1473006 - Address book MAB file corrupted after system crash

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Address Book, defect)

Description

[linus]

Attachment: abook.mab

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:61.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/61.0
Build ID: 20180621125625

Steps to reproduce:

System crash while Thunderbird was openned (Windows 10 did not manage to enter hibernation before battery was depleted...)

Probably hard to reproduce the crash an corruption of the mab file.
But the abook.mab file I attached can be used to reproduce the behaviour.

Version is 52.8.0 (did not know how to translate this into "branch").


Actual results:

When I started Thunderbird after the crash I first noticed that something was wrong because the view (visible columns) of my inbox were back to defaults. This was easy to set back to my previous preferences.

But apparently, my address book file abook.mab has been corrupted in some way as well. Contacts I already had in my address book are no longer shown with the yellow star in the message header. Clicking the star that should normally add them to the address book just does nothing.

When I open address book, I only see "Collected Addresses" under "All Address Books", but "Personal Address Book" is missing.

When I close Thunderbird, delete abook.mab from my profile folder and restart Thunderbird, a new empty abook.mab is created and I can again see "Personal Address Book" and also add contacts again.


Expected results:

I should be able to still use my old abook.mab file as before the crash. What's wrong with the file. I replaced all names and e-mail addresses in the mab file with "Anonymous" to be able to upload it here. Just put it in a Thunderbird profile folder and start Thunderbird. I would be most interested in a way to restore my addresses. This is in fact the second time already that I have experiences this! I don't want to start building my address book from scratch again...! Did not make a backup.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I looked at the file.  Would you agree this appears to be like bug 366457?

Comment 2

[linus]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #1)
> I looked at the file.  Would you agree this appears to be like bug 366457?

Thanks for the quick response!

I don't think it's like bug 366457. Because if you use my abook.mab file in a TB profile, there will be no automatic copying of it to abook.mab.bak nor will a new empty abook.mab be created, as it is described in bug 366457. With my file, TB will just start normally but "Personal Address Book" is simply not visible and you cannot add contacts via the yellow star, as I have described.
Also I do not see any "gibberish ASCII characters at the end of the file". You would have to tell me, if there is anything else wrong with my file. I would really like to know which parts of it I would have to alter to make it work again.

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

My suggestion: Export as CSV, import into a new address book. In the future, do a backup a least weekly ;-)

Comment 4

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

We're not using mork address books anymore.