Email irregularities

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Peter Creasey
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Joined: October 26th, 2007, 2:32 pm
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Email irregularities

Post by Peter Creasey »

On WinXP SP3 machine these email processor irregularities have been noticed so far...

1) Templates folder with my templates has disappeared;

2) Signature is no longer automatically inserted when composing an email to be sent even though this option is checked with a link to the signature; and

3) Address books contain the wrong addresses (contains addresses from another address book).

Any thoughts?

Thanks!
. . . . . . . . . . Pete
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DanRaisch
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Re: Email irregularities

Post by DanRaisch »

1) How is that account set up in SeaMonkey, as a POP or IMAP type account?

2a) Backup you entire profile, just to be safe ( http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup ). The concept we're working from is that the current address book file is fragmented or corrupted and should be rebuilt to correct the issue. Before starting the procedure below, be sure to backup the SeaMonkey Profile or at least all files in that profile that have the extension .mab.

b) Open SeaMonkey's Address Book window and create a new Address Book (File->New->Address Book). Name it anything except Personal Address Book. (I would call it Temp Data to indicate it's purpose.)

c) Click on the your current Address Book (I'm assuming it's called Personal Address Book). Now click on any name in the right hand list pane. Press Ctrl-A or use menu path Edit->Select All to highlight all entries.

d) Drag-and-drop the data to the entry in the left hand pane for the new address book. This will copy over all of your address information. Check a number of the contact entries in the new address book to ensure that things have been copied correctly.

e) Close SeaMonkey and navigate to the SeaMonkey profile folder. Locate and delete the file abook.mab.

f) Launch SeaMonkey and open the Address Book window.

g) Highlight all of the contacts in the Temp Data (or whatever you named it) address book and drag-and-drop the data to the Personal Address Book.

h) Close and restart SeaMonkey and begin using the "recreated" Personal Address book for addressing messages. See if there has been any improvement.
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Peter Creasey
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Re: Email irregularities

Post by Peter Creasey »

Dan, thanks, I'll try to see if I can follow those instructions.

This doesn't appear to address the failure to insert the signature automatically when composing messages and the templates folder that disappeared.

[EDITED TO ASK} Rather than the strategy you suggest, might it be safer and easier for someone like me to just delete the address books from SeaMonkey, then import the backup copies I have stored?
. . . . . . . . . . Pete
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DanRaisch
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Re: Email irregularities

Post by DanRaisch »

I don't have any suggestions regarding the signature issue.

As for the address book backup file, it would depend on whether the backup was made before or after the file corruption occurred, if that is what it is.
amrad
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Re: Email irregularities

Post by amrad »

Hello Dan,
DanRaisch wrote:Before starting the procedure below, be sure to backup the SeaMonkey Profile or at least all files in that profile that have the extension .mab.
Surely, it should be the files without the .mab extension that should be backed-up, shouldn't they? After all, they are the ones which contain the emails. The .mab files will be recreated when SeaMonkey is run.

Regards,

Dave
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DanRaisch
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Re: Email irregularities

Post by DanRaisch »

You asked (or seemed to be asking) about "importing" backup copies of the the address book files. That's what I was responding to. If those .mab files were corrupted before the backup copy was made, you would only end up importing the same corruption issue by copying in those files.

If you want to empty the address book files and add contact data from scratch, just delete the files with the extension .mab. But I would suggest that you try the procedure I outlined above as that would let you try to recover the contact data if it can be done.
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Peter Creasey
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Re: Email irregularities

Post by Peter Creasey »

Dan, thanks again for the dialogue. The previous posting you replied to was from Dave.

If I take the backups aproach, my plan would be to get the address book backups from another PC so there should be no danger of them having been corrupted.
. . . . . . . . . . Pete
amrad
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Re: Email irregularities

Post by amrad »

Hello Dan,
amrad wrote:Surely, it should be the files without the .mab extension that should be backed-up, shouldn't they?
My apologies, I was thinking about the files with the .msf extension, so what I wrote was incorrect! :oops:

Regards,

Dave.
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DanRaisch
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Re: Email irregularities

Post by DanRaisch »

Sorry about the confusion, Pete. Yes, if you copy over address books from another PC they should be good if they were working properly on that other PC.

No problem, Dave.
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