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 corrupt, 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
You can use a Thunderbird extension instead as well, if you prefer that. Check out our review of the Thunderbird Duplicate Contact Manager extension for instructions on how to use it instead.
Instead of having to create a new address book and copy data to it from the old, you can use the extension instead to do so.
To use it, open the address book after you have installed it and select find and manage duplicates from the Tools menu there.
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You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!