Remove Duplicate Address Book Entries in Thunderbird

It can happen that you end up with duplicate address book entries in Mozilla Thunderbird and wonder how you can remove them so that only one entry per contact is visible in the Thunderbird Address Book. The current Thunderbird address book is most likely fragmented or corrupted and the easiest way to fix that is to create a new Address Book and copy the contents of the old Address Book into the new one.

You should backup your Thunderbird profile before you start this process. The easiest way would be to use the software MozBackup which creates a backup of a selected profile with just a few clicks.

After the profile data has been saved you can begin the process of creating a new Address Book in Thunderbird to get rid of Duplicate Address Book entries.

• Click on Tools > Address Book which opens the Address Bock. Click now on File > New Address Book and enter a new name for it. This is only temporary, so a name like ‘temp address book’ would do
• Click on an entry in your old Address Book, use the shortcut CTRL + A to mark all entries
• Press CTRL and drag & drop the entries to the new Address Book. Check the number of Address Cards, they have to be identical.
• Go back to the Personal Address Bock, mark all messages and delete them.
• Restart Thunderbird, open the Address Book menu again
• Now click on the new Address Book and mark all messages. Drag & Drop them back to the Personal Address Book. Compare the figures again, make sure they are identical.
• Restart Thunderbird once again and use the recreated Address Book

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Tags: thunderbird, thunderbird tips
Categories: Email

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One Response to “Remove Duplicate Address Book Entries in Thunderbird”

1. Frank Cahill says:

   March 20, 2008 at 8:29 pm

   HI I am running TBird 2.0.0.12 on Vista. It will not allow copy and past from within the Address Book!

   Is this a problem with Vista only?
   I have copied my addresses using LDIF format from an XP machine but I cannot get these addresses into the abook.mab file. They are currently sitting in impab-1.mab.

   Thanks,

   Frank

   Reply