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Can I recover deleted contacts from a Thunderbird address book?

  • 3 replies
  • 2 have this problem
  • 5 views
  • Last reply by sfhowes

suebsf
suebsf
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I use Thunderbird to access both my primary and secondary riseup.net email accounts. For whatever reason, I decided since I don't use most of the contacts in my address book for the secondary account, that I would delete most of them. I didn't realize that the address book for both accounts was the same, and now I've deleted almost all the hundreds of contacts that I need! Is it possible to recover deleted contacts from a Thunderbird address book?

I use Thunderbird to access both my primary and secondary riseup.net email accounts. For whatever reason, I decided since I don't use most of the contacts in my address book for the secondary account, that I would delete most of them. I didn't realize that the address book for both accounts was the same, and now I've deleted almost all the hundreds of contacts that I need! Is it possible to recover deleted contacts from a Thunderbird address book?

All Replies (3)

Zenos
Zenos
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I don't think you can recover deleted Contacts. Sorry.

For the future, this add-on:

https://nic-nac-project.org/~kaosmos/morecols-en.html

lets you associate particular address books with an email account. This is most relevant if you use auto-complete to fill in Contacts when writing an email, since it limits the search to the nominated address books. It won't make any difference if you use the visual pick approach.

To rebuild your lost address book data, you could use this add-on:

https://nic-nac-project.org/~kaosmos/index-en.html#eac

which can crawl through email folders and look for email addresses in the headers and bodies. It won't, of course, recover street addresses and phone numbers for you. :-(

suebsf
suebsf Question owner
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Thanks, Zenos. I'm hoping someone else might say something otherwise before I give up hope of recovering it all!

sfhowes
sfhowes
  • Top 25 Contributor
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The first add-on mentioned above, MoreFunctionsForAddressBook, has an option to recover deleted contacts. In Address Book, right-click the address book in the left pane (Directory Pane), select MoreFunctionsForAddressBook/Recover/Restore, and follow the prompts. After you restart TB, there will be a new address book, with a numeric name, containing the recovered contacts. Move contacts to other address books by drag and drop.