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How do I save my Address Book contacts to reinstall at a later date or when reinstalling Thunderbird?

  • 1 reply
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  • Last reply by duggabe

jackelen
jackelen
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I lost my Personal Address file in Cyber Space and all of my contacts. I reinstalled my contact information into a new Personal Address file and want to make sure I save a copy of the file in case the file gets lost again.

Also, when I created a new email and typed in the first few letters of the address contact, it automatically opened up the persons contact but in a form that is different than what I entered into my personal address book and is not able to be sent. It showed the email address as, <" m*****"@hotmail.com> . There is the symbol " in front of their email name and in front of the @ symbol in the email address, which is not what I installed in my personal address book. I had these kind of emails in the Collected Addresses file which I'm guessing caused my problem to start with. I do not need to have a Collected Address file. Somehow I must have hit the wrong keyboard key and created this problem. I do not want to uninstall and reinstall Thunderbird in fear of loosing all of my contacts again. I spent two days reinstalling my contacts in the Personal Address file and even then information is missing. So now I have to contact everyone and request phone numbers and home addresses and install all of them again.

As a final note, I deleted all of the addresses in the Collected Addresses file. Can you tell me where they may be saved at so I can make sure they are gone and not interfering with my new Address Book and function of my email account?

Thank you for your time and consideration in resolving this problem. Dave

I lost my Personal Address file in Cyber Space and all of my contacts. I reinstalled my contact information into a new Personal Address file and want to make sure I save a copy of the file in case the file gets lost again. Also, when I created a new email and typed in the first few letters of the address contact, it automatically opened up the persons contact but in a form that is different than what I entered into my personal address book and is not able to be sent. It showed the email address as, <" m*****"@hotmail.com> . There is the symbol " in front of their email name and in front of the @ symbol in the email address, which is not what I installed in my personal address book. I had these kind of emails in the Collected Addresses file which I'm guessing caused my problem to start with. I do not need to have a Collected Address file. Somehow I must have hit the wrong keyboard key and created this problem. I do not want to uninstall and reinstall Thunderbird in fear of loosing all of my contacts again. I spent two days reinstalling my contacts in the Personal Address file and even then information is missing. So now I have to contact everyone and request phone numbers and home addresses and install all of them again. As a final note, I deleted all of the addresses in the Collected Addresses file. Can you tell me where they may be saved at so I can make sure they are gone and not interfering with my new Address Book and function of my email account? Thank you for your time and consideration in resolving this problem. Dave

All Replies (1)

duggabe
duggabe
more options

As far as the collected addresses, look at Preferences -> Composition -> Addressing and either uncheck 'Automatically add outgoing e-mail addresses to my ...' or change the choice to your personal address book.

For backup, you have several options: 

   (a) you can manually export the address book to a file (use LDIF instead of CSV, as it is much easier to import later if needed).
   (b) you can have your OS do periodic backups.
   (c) if you have a gmail account, you can use an add-on to TB called gContactSync which will automatically sync your address book to your gmail address book.
   I use both (b) and (c).

Once you deleted the Collected Addresses, did the problem with the quote mark go away?