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Unable to edit TB Address Book

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  • Last reply by Bill Coffin

Bill Coffin
Bill Coffin
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Running the latest version of Thunderbird on the latest Windows 10, and still unable to edit the address book. Cannot add names to existing groups. (I CAN delete from groups). Cannot delete names from Collected Addresses list. There are hundreds of duplicate entries in that list.

I tried exporting LDIF files and a CSV file, exiting TB, renaming abook.sqlite to abook.sqlite.bak, restarting TB, and importing. (I did the CSV file to delete duplicate entries, since LDIF seems to keep them.) On restarting TB, the old address entries were still there. I successfully imported the CSV file and then had two Collected Address lists. Could not delete from the old list and could not delete the list itself, so I couldn't cut&paste from old to new. Gave up and restored the abook.sqlite file.

Apologies, I know similar issues have cropped up but I couldn't find anything directly relevant. I think Mozilla should put out a script to fix this; it seems that many people are encountering similar problems, probably from the sqlite changeover, and it's pretty tough to fix. (I have a degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, but most of your users are far less equipped for fixing this stuff. My wife, for instance!)

Running the latest version of Thunderbird on the latest Windows 10, and still unable to edit the address book. Cannot add names to existing groups. (I CAN delete from groups). Cannot delete names from Collected Addresses list. There are hundreds of duplicate entries in that list. I tried exporting LDIF files and a CSV file, exiting TB, renaming abook.sqlite to abook.sqlite.bak, restarting TB, and importing. (I did the CSV file to delete duplicate entries, since LDIF seems to keep them.) On restarting TB, the old address entries were still there. I successfully imported the CSV file and then had two Collected Address lists. Could not delete from the old list and could not delete the list itself, so I couldn't cut&paste from old to new. Gave up and restored the abook.sqlite file. Apologies, I know similar issues have cropped up but I couldn't find anything directly relevant. I think Mozilla should put out a script to fix this; it seems that many people are encountering similar problems, probably from the sqlite changeover, and it's pretty tough to fix. (I have a degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, but most of your users are far less equipped for fixing this stuff. My wife, for instance!)

Chosen solution

abook.sqlite is the personal address book. Collected is stored in the history.sqlite.

Each address book has it's own SQLITE file.

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Matt
Matt
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Chosen Solution

abook.sqlite is the personal address book. Collected is stored in the history.sqlite.

Each address book has it's own SQLITE file.

Bill Coffin
Bill Coffin Question owner
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It is a partial solution. I still end up with thousands of duplicates which I could remove using CSV format (excel has a "remove duplicates" feature) but the entries all look really weird on re-import.

Also, I end up with pairs of address books, the "old" one empty but not delete-able. Obvious workaround is to create new groups in the old address book, then drag&drop entries from new groups to old, then delete the new address book. But this is a ton of work! Too bad you can't drag&drop groups from one book to another -- seems like an obvious feature... Or even better, if TB recognized that you're importing an address book with the same name as your current empty book, and then TB would import into the empty book instead of creating a new one with the same name. Shouldn't be too difficult.

Modified by Bill Coffin