Address book has disappeared

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jrkmo
Posts: 2
Joined: October 16th, 2018, 9:22 am

Address book has disappeared

Post by jrkmo »

I logged in to my PC this morning and when I opened Thunderbird, almost all of my contacts were gone. There are a few thousand contacts. Now there are less than a hundred. They were all there yesterday. All of my emails and other settings are still there.

I only have one user on this PC, so it's not a user account issue.

I have automatic online backups of my C drive, so I restored the address.mab and history.mab files from last week. I renamed the existing files in my profile, and then drag/dropped the restored .mab files to the profile folder. Restarted, but then nothing changed. So either the backup was bad, or there's some other location that Thunderbird is using for the address book.

Any ideas?
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tanstaafl
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Posts: 49647
Joined: July 30th, 2003, 5:06 pm

Re: Address book has disappeared

Post by tanstaafl »

Your address book (both the deleted copy and the 1 week old backup you replaced it with) might be corrupted.

I suggest you export the personal address book as a .csv or .ldif file and open the file in a text editor. There is a fairly obvious pattern/format for the entries. See if you spot something that looks out of place/corrupted. You may be able to either delete or fix the corrupted entry using the text editor. Sometimes none of the entries are damaged but some gobbledegook is added at the end of the file which you just need to delete. When you're done import the address book.

If you run into problems use the MoreFunctionsFromAddressBook add-on to import a older version of the abook.mab file
and then export it as a .csv or .ldif file. You might learn something by doing a side by side comparison of its contents with the corrupt version.

If that doesn't help try running in safe mode (help -> restart with add-ons disabled) on the faint chance that a bad add-on caused this problem.

https://www.trendingtop5.com/how-to-rec ... ook-files/
http://mike.therhoadsonline.com/2009/02 ... -book.html
jrkmo
Posts: 2
Joined: October 16th, 2018, 9:22 am

Re: Address book has disappeared

Post by jrkmo »

So are you saying that even though they are not displaying in Thunderbird, the contacts may still be in the MAB file? And I can export via Thunderbird the mab to CSV? My concern is that it'd only export the few remaining email addresses, and not everything.
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tanstaafl
Moderator
Posts: 49647
Joined: July 30th, 2003, 5:06 pm

Re: Address book has disappeared

Post by tanstaafl »

jrkmo wrote:So are you saying that even though they are not displaying in Thunderbird, the contacts may still be in the MAB file?
Yes.
jrkmo wrote:And I can export via Thunderbird the mab to CSV?
Yes. Select the address book in the address book window and then use tools -> export.
jrkmo wrote:My concern is that it'd only export the few remaining email addresses, and not everything.
It should export everything, including any goobledegook if that exists. However, if it doesn't the links I provided at the bottom of my prior post describe how to edit the *.mab files. That is more error prone than editing a .csv or .ldif file, so it wouldn't be my first choice.
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