How do I restore a corrupt address book?

[storm_the_dog]

I opened a mail and suddenly the laptop went crazy and now the address book is empty and the Personal Folder missing.

I have looked for a solution but they refer to abook1.mab and abook2.mab files which I don't have, only an abook.mab. Neither do I have an abook.mab.bak file. However, what I do have is a backup profile on another drive.

How do I return the Address Book to normal working order?

[tanstaafl]

Copy the *.mab files from the backup to the new profile. It will always know about abook.mab (personal address book) and history.mab (collected addresses address book). Normally it would ignore abook1.mab and abook2.mab if you just copied them to the profile. But they seem to be imported address books that your prefs.js file (it stores all of the settings) already knows about. You didn't mention anything about suddenly losing your accounts so I'd assume your prefs.js file hasn't been trashed.

Before you do anything I'd run something like the free version of MalwareBytes anti-malware (it won't prevent malware but will help you recover from it) plus have your anti-virus scanner scan the entire drive. Its possible you just ran into a bug in Thunderbird due to it mis-interpreting a command but there is a good chance there was malware in that message. Especially if you have the bad habit of enabling view -> display attachments inline.

[storm_the_dog]

Ah, just realised they are FF backups, not TBird. I don't mind adding the email addresses manually but I would like to have a Personal Address folder to put them in and for the drop down dialogue in the mail address field to work. TBird works fine otherwise. Bitdefender and Malwarebytes didn't find any malware.

[tanstaafl]

I don't know of any email address crawler's that work with version 68. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/th ... -4/?src=ss supposedly works with version 52.* but not 60.* or later.

[storm_the_dog]

I have found an old backup but with a different default profile. Would this be useful?

[tanstaafl]

Yes. The address books are not account specific. They might not be as up to date as the address books you lost but they're a good start. If they have different filenames rename them as necessary after you copy them, so that your current profile recognizes them.

[storm_the_dog]

I'm not so interested in the names in there, just restoring the Address Book to normality. At the moment I do not have a personal folder and cannot create a new one.

BTW, when I log in I get this message - .

The file is not read-only.

[storm_the_dog]

OK, all sorted. Many thanks.