Open The Thunderbird Address Book Separately

Thunderbird, like any other email program, comes with an address book that contains email addresses and often other information about contacts.
The program adds all outgoing email contacts automatically to the address book by default and provides you with options to add custom addresses manually as well.
The address book may contain more than just the email address and name of the contact. Information may include photos, addresses, work related information and custom notes.
There are even extensions that synchronize data with social networking sites. We have reviewed Thunderbird Contacts in the past which can be used for that purpose.
Most users open the Thunderbird address book from within the email client. That's great as long as the program is already open. But what if you want to open the address book when Thunderbird is not running on the system?
You could of course start Thunderbird on the computer before opening the address book via Tools > Address Book or with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-B.
Or, you could create a new shortcut on your computer that opens the Thunderbird address book directly and without starting the email client itself.
Navigate to the Mozilla Thunderbird folder on your computer. The default installation folder under Windows is C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\
Right-click the thunderbird.exe file and select Create Shortcut. Save it in that directory or alternatively on the desktop if restrictions prevent the saving to the same directory.
Right-click the shortcut afterwards and select Properties from the context menu. Locate the Target path in the Shortcut tab and add -addressbook at the end of it (there is a blank between the closing " and the -addressbook, the end should read thunderbird.exe -addressbook).
Select Apply and OK afterwards. Double-click the shortcut. If things went right, you should now see the address book open up immediately. If something went wrong, retrace the steps to correct the error.
The most common error is that the target field has not been filled out correctly.

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!