1017570 - Cannot "add to address book" in thunderbird on mac after encountering "Unable to load address book file abook.mab. It may be read-only, or locked by another application. Please try again later."

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, defect)

Description

[Arthur Goldberg]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/35.0.1916.114 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Run TB 24.5.0 on Mac 10.8.5.
Configure TB so that File-"Use Mac OS X Address Book" is not selected. Can open Address Book and see addresses in "COllected Addresses" & create New contact there.
but in TB cannot "add to address book". I click on star to right of email address or ctrl-click correspondent and "add to address book".



Actual results:

Nothing.


Expected results:

correspondent should be added to (some) address book. 

this has worked previously. then I encountered "Unable to load address book file abook.mab. It may be read-only, or locked by another application. Please try again later." but that has stopped happening.

Comment 1

[Arthur Goldberg]

This is a major inconvenience. I would welcome any workaround, and fairly pay someone who helps me.

Thanks
Arthur

Comment 2

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(In reply to Arthur Goldberg from comment #0)
> Run TB 24.5.0 on Mac 10.8.5.
> this has worked previously.
> then I encountered "Unable to load address book file abook.mab. It may be read-only, or locked by another application.
> Please try again later.

Same phenomenon as bug 495911, bug 717574, bug 893786?
Is "number of file handle limit" setting in OS kept sufficiently large?

Comment 3

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

Do you see exceptions in Error Console?

Comment 4

[Arthur Goldberg]

 I am NOT currently encountering "Unable to load address book file abook.mab. It may be read-only, or locked by another application." 

 the behavior I see is completely described in "Steps to reproduce:" above.

(In reply to WADA from comment #2)
> (In reply to Arthur Goldberg from comment #0)
> > Run TB 24.5.0 on Mac 10.8.5.
> > this has worked previously.
> > then I encountered "Unable to load address book file abook.mab. It may be read-only, or locked by another application.
> > Please try again later.
> 
> Same phenomenon as bug 495911, bug 717574, bug 893786?
> Is "number of file handle limit" setting in OS kept sufficiently large?

Comment 5

[Arthur Goldberg]

Attachment: error console from starting Thunderbird

Comment 6

[Arthur Goldberg]

 I do not see any message in the error console when I tried to " add to address book". I do see several messages when I start Thunderbird and have uploaded a screenshot of them.

(In reply to WADA from comment #3)
> Do you see exceptions in Error Console?

Comment 7

[Arthur Goldberg]

 This is a major inconvenience because I use the address book to distinguish  between junk mail from people who I do not know and good mail from people who I do know.

 Currently the only way for me to add anybody to the address book is to do so by hand, one at a time in " collected addresses"

 I welcome any work around that would let me add somebody to an address book with a single click.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Arthur, What happens when you restart Thunderbird in safe mode via Help | Restart

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Perhaps after encountering the .mab opening problem something got hosed.
Very interested to hear if this is happening for Art in version 31.

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Arthur seems to be gone. But it would be interesting to know whether this still occurs in version 31 or version 38.  

>  Currently the only way for me to add anybody to the address book is to do so by hand, one at a time in " collected addresses"

Unfortunately nothing in the Error Console looks relevant. But sounds like prefs for personal address book got trashed.  We still need more data about the user profile

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk, use Needinfo for questions) from comment #10)
> Arthur seems to be gone. But it would be interesting to know whether this
> still occurs in version 31 or version 38.  

(and apparently Arthur no longer works at cs.nyu.edu )

Comment 12

[Phoenix]

Resolved per whiteboard