Thunderbird address book disaster.
Out of the blue, while I was working with thunderbird and wanted to write a new email I received the following error message
Code:
One of your address book files (impab-2.mab file) could not be read. Can anybody give me a hint as to how I could extract that info easier or maybe even recuperate the old file by some handy cut and paste work? |
First of all, lol
Secondly. if you can read the address as plain text, then mabey all you need to do is seperate every line that has the @ character in it. like mabey with cat impab-2.mab.bak |grep @ > output.txt leaving the addresses with probably slightly less junk. you might be able to filter it better to leave just the addresses |
You might be able to use one of those programs that converts addresses books to be used in antoher app. Maybe you can convert it to something else then back and see if it loads then.
Brian1 |
Thanks for the suggestions guys. I thought about the filtering, but the way the way Garda proposes isn't practical bacause a lot of those emails eman little to nothing to me without the names attached.
As for the second option, I haven't checked the import function in thunderbird itself, but from what I've read it supports comma or tab seperated fields. The structure of the file simply looks too complicated to me (I'll try anyway when I get home) it's like a list of code explanations at the top something like (a1=)(a2=)(ab=)(ac=) followed by some of those fields being filled in for some of the email adresses (a1=)(a2=aname )(ab=anemail@somewhere)(ac=) in addition all the accented characters (ñ, á, etc) look something like $a$n etc. What a mess!! And then there are all the home addresses, telephone numbers and other details... I never thought I'd need to back all of that up :( I sure will next time (or so I hope). |
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