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I just lost all my mail lists in my address book, how do I get them back?

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I have customized a number of mail lists in my Thunderbird address book for my different businesses over a few years, and when I used Thunderbird today they were ALL gone. The actual email addresses are still in address book but in one big bundle, making it useless since the different mail lists target completely different people, and in different languages..! Is there ANY way to restore them? I haven't updated Thunderbird, nor restarted my macbook in a few days so I can't figure out the reason why they would simply disappear! PLEASE HELP.

I have customized a number of mail lists in my Thunderbird address book for my different businesses over a few years, and when I used Thunderbird today they were ALL gone. The actual email addresses are still in address book but in one big bundle, making it useless since the different mail lists target completely different people, and in different languages..! Is there ANY way to restore them? I haven't updated Thunderbird, nor restarted my macbook in a few days so I can't figure out the reason why they would simply disappear! PLEASE HELP.
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All Replies (8)

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Your Address Book shows the OS X address book and Collected Addresses. Did you ever have a Personal Address Book, which is present by default, with Collected Addresses, in all TB setups? Were all your lists in the OS X address book, as it appears? If so, do the lists still appear in the OS X book when you view it from OS X?

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Correct, I had a personal Address Book and a number of mailing lists under that. And all email addresses saved in these lists were also saved in the Collected Addresses. And the email addresses themselves are still all there (in Collected Addresses) from what I can see, but they are now of course only sorted A-Z. So it seems my customized lists are just gone.. And I just recently noticed that I can no longer save an email address to the address book by clicking the star next to the email address, if that somehow is related..!

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When an address book doesn't accept edits or new entries, it indicates the book is corrupted. The standard remedy is to export, delete and re-import:

1. Export the address book to an LDIF file (Tools/Export, Save as type: LDIF). 2. Help/Troubleshooting Information, click Show in Finder, close TB, delete abook.mab, if Personal Address Book is the damaged address book. 3. Start TB, Tools/Import... Address books...Text file... select the LDIF file. 4. Open Address Book, select the contacts in the imported address book and drag them onto the Personal Address Book icon in the left pane.

Personal Address Book should now retain additions and edits.

Since your Personal Address Book has disappeared, there may still be an abook.mab in the profile folder which is unreadable, so deleting or moving will force TB to automatically recreate an empty Personal Address Book upon restart. Contacts from Collected Addresses can be copied to PAB by drag and drop, while holding Ctrl. Unfortunately, if you don't have a backup of abook.mab, you'll have to recreate the mailing lists. Create a new mailing list, name it and close it, then drag contacts from the address book to the list icon.

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When exporting and saving as LDIF it seems it can't save any email addresses. It simply says "No cards found - could not find any cards to add"

Is there any other way of exporting email addresses to make sure I don't loose them completely?

I can recreate the mailing lists by looking at sent emails and one by one add them back to a new send list. But is there any point of going through all that if the book is corrupted?

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I'm somewhat confused, as your 2nd picture doesn't look the TB Address Book, but maybe it's the OS X address book. Your first picture shows (in Swedish), All Address Books, Mac OS X address book, and Collected Addresses. There should be a Personal Address Book, which is a default book, with Collected Addresses.

Do you have an abook.mab file in the profile folder? If you do, close TB and move it out of the profile, then restart TB and see if a Personal Address Book is automatically created. Then, we can discuss whether to create the lists from the new, uncorrupted PAB, or to create a new address book from File/New... If, at the moment, your only functioning address book is Collected Addresses, you can export it to an LDIF for backup, or backup the history.mab file in the profile.

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After updating Thunderbird yesterday, my address book and two other email addresses have disappeared. How do I get them back?

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whymemini888 said

After updating Thunderbird yesterday, my address book and two other email addresses have disappeared. How do I get them back?

Help/Troubleshooting Information, about:profiles. Is there another profile listed besides the current one, and if you launch it in a new browser, do you see your accounts and address book?

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I have been able to delete the update by following this: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1268627

It gave me this Chosen solution

Uninstall TB 68 (won't affect the profile folder), and download and run the installer for 60.9:

https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/releases/60.9.0/win32/en-US/

Check that you don't have some kind of 3rd-party software updater, e.g. Kaspersky, updating to 68.

I was a bit dubious but as all had gone, why not.

It worked, currently now have problems downloading e mails, but I have all three e mail addresses, and my address book back.