Email Contacts

[burris]

Tbird 60.7.1 64

Suddenly my email lost all the contacts in the write menu.
All email is working fine except for that.
I tried a restore from yesterday's moz backup but it didn't restore and was asking to input new account.
I tried the other pcv files stored but same thing.

thanks

[DanRaisch]

A bit more detail may help here. Do you mean that the list of contacts you normally saw displayed at the left of the Write window is no longer present? If you start typing an email address in to the entry field at the top of the Write window, does Thunderbird display possible matches as you type?

[burris]

I had 4 address books...only one shows contacts...the others show the headers but open to empty...no contacts.

When I click a letter in write screen ,only those in the one remaning address book show.

[DanRaisch]

Search the hard drive for files with the extension .mab. How many are present?
Those PCV files are simply ZIP files with the extension changed from ZIP to PCV. You can use an "unzip" utility to view the contents and extract any .mab files that you find.

[burris]

Lots of abook.mab files all over. Zip opener cannot open file as an archive although it can extract. I extracted one on deskto to test but won't open..
I suppose I can try to move some previous ones into the profile and see what happens each time?

[DanRaisch]

I extracted one on deskto to test but won't open..

I don't understand that statement. What was it you extracted, just the .mab files or something else? What did you try to open and how did you do that?

[burris]

I look in my tBird profile, I see 4 mab files.
abook.mab 20kb + three more starting with abook-1.mab and -2 -3...the ones with numbers are only 2kb each.

[DanRaisch]

The files abook-1.mab (and the like) are either created by importing external data or are failed attempts by Thunderbird to save to the file abook.mab. Did you import address book data from other applications or files?

Failure to update abook.mab could be caused by the file be marked as read only under Windows 10 or by an anti-virus/security software mistakenly identifying changes to abook.mab as the work of malware.

[burris]

When Moz Backup didn't restore Tbird, I did try to import it from Moz Backup...as well as from the backed up profile on ext drive