[SOLVED] Help needed with address book in Thunderbird 60.8.0

[tomdkat]

Hi! So, a friend's Windows 10 system took a dump and I ended up having to do a factory restore to get it working again. Before doing the restore, I managed to save her entire Thunderbird profile to an external hard drive. Cool.

After getting the system running again, I downloaded Thunderbird 60.8.0 and ran it. After it prompted to create a new email account, I canceled that operation and closed Thunderbird. Then, I replaced the "Thunderbird" folder in %APPDATA%\Roaming\Thunderbird with the files I saved to the external hard drive. When I re-opened Thunderbird, all of her email accounts appeared and it started downloading new mail. Cool.

Then, I received a message indicating the "abook.mab" file couldn't be loaded, due to it being locked or in use by another process. I also received the message about "abook-1.mab". I've scoured the web (including this forum) to find ways to effectively recover the addresses in her address book. Nothing has worked and even if I get a "clean" LDIF file created and imported, when I close and open Thunderbird, I'm told the "abook-1.mab" file couldn't be opened, due to it being locked or in use by another process. I'll also get a message about "impab.mab" or "impab-1.mab" not being opened, due to it being locked or in use by another process. When I open the address book, nothing that was imported appeared.

I used the PHP script discussed in this thread to "recover" the MAB files:

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1397060

Using that script, I was able to get the email addresses out of the MAB file and into a text file I could then import into Thunderbird 60.8.0 on Linux Mint 18. At that point, I exported the address book I just imported into LDIF format, transferred the file to the Windows 10 box and was able to get the file imported. Then, when I close Thunderbird and re-open it, I get the error messages about the MAB files not being loaded and none of the addresses I imported appear.

So, what is the best way to recover the addresses? I still have access to the original MAB files I saved on the external hard drive.

Thanks in advance!

Peace...

[tomdkat]

Ok, so apparently, I didn't copy the profile over correctly. Once I followed the instructions posted here *correctly*:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_p ... ne_over_it

The address books now load without issue.

Peace...

[tanstaafl]

The MoreFunctionsForAddressBooks add-on is the normal way to import *.mab address books that aren't already defined in your prefs.js file. https://freeshell.de/~kaosmos/morecols-en.html

Dawn is a useful free tool to convert address books between different file formats. The *.mab address book format hasn't changed in decades so the fact its a old abandoned tool shouldn't matter. I've used it numerous times, though not for a couple of years. If you convert the *.mab file to a .ldif or .csv file look at it in a text editor (NOT a word processor) and see if there are any damaged entries. The format is easy to figure out. Delete or fix anything damaged and that might work around problems due to corrupted data (unusual but it does happen).

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Mail_Utilities#Dawn

[tanstaafl]

Oops, I did not see your last post