Closed Bug 366457 Opened 18 years ago Closed 5 years ago

Address Book Corruption / deletion - Possible memory dump appended to original abook.mab file

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, defect)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
Address Book
Platform:
x86
Windows XP
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
critical

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED WORKSFORME

People

(Reporter: thunderbirdbug, Unassigned)

References

(
URL
)

Details

(Keywords: dataloss, Whiteboard: [gs])

Attachments

(6 files)

Excerpt of the guck addended to the .mab file
266.50 KB, text/plain
Details
Contains only plain text from symantec
11.06 KB, text/plain
Details
Zipped text file of second crash, contains registry data as well
36.78 KB, application/zip
Details
Zipped text file of third example, contains e-mail from Thunderbird
52.58 KB, application/zip
Details
Several types of garbage data
3.97 KB, text/plain
Details
corrupt data in personal address book
773 bytes, text/plain
Details
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.9) Gecko/20061206 Firefox/1.5.0.9 Build Identifier: version 1.5.0.9 (20061207) First a little background. I am the network administrator of approximately 30 remote users connecting to our courier-imap server Via IMAP(secure) for mail retrieval. Unfortunately about every 2-4 weeks another user loses their address book (which is very bad since everyone communicates almost exclusively through e-mail). Our Thunderbird installations are all the same and do not contain any extra extensions or themes on most installations. The users simply do not know yet how to use TB like that. Almost every user is setup with one IMAP(S) and one SMTP(S) connection. No private e-mail, no RSS feeds, no newsgroups. E-mail is stored on the IMAP server. The problem is that randomly, without any apparent cause, and without any apparent similarities between users or activites they were engaged in, the user's address book will become corrupted, moved to abook.mab.bak and a blank address book will take it's place. The problem comes when one of the users will shutdown Thunderbird and then later re-open it (like a user normally would). They tell me that they notice it missing on the first e-mail they were trying to send out after opening the program. One user had this problem occur overnight, another user had it occur over a lunch break, another user had it occur after a reboot, and a final user had it occur over the weekend. Unfortunately, my boss also had it occur after Thunderbird ate up over 500MB of system RAM and crashed. Not a good impression :( Thunderbird's Address book can be restored from another file (backup / export) or another (working) installation without any apparent negative effects to any other portion of the application. Most abook.mab.bak files which have been sent to me, after they report this problem, contain gibberish ASCII characters at the end of the file, and after comparing it to my working copy, I realized those characters should not be there. But we got lucky this last time. The most recent user to report this issue sent me her abook.mab.bak file and it contained plain english text from the Symantec Liveupdate process (I suspect it was a RAM dump of the address spaced used by that process). Normally it is just random garbage. After deleting everything after the properly formatted portion of the file (4000 lines or so) and saving the file as abook.mab, we were successfully able to shutdown her installation of Thunderbird and move this fixed abook.mab file over top of the existing "blank" copy. Opening Thunderbird produced all of the contacts she used to have (to her best recollection) but all of the mailing lists were either blank or missing. I have instructed my staff to contact me if this problem occurs, and from here out to send me their abook.mab.bak files. But I was wondering if there is any sort of logging that can be enabled to see which process is causing this issue or what information will need to be known for the developers to fix this problem. Thanks, Robert Reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. I know of no common or easily reproducable method to reproduce this issue other than to install Thunderbird on 30+ machines of varying types, and waiting for something to happen. Text excerpt from the end of the abook.mab.bak file in question. ... (^9D=)(^9E=)(^9F=)(^A0=)(^A1=)(^A2=)(^A3=)(^A4=)(^A5=)(^A6=)(^A7=) (^A8=)(^A9=)(^AA=)(^AB=)(^AC=)(^AD=)(^AE=)(^AF=)(^B0=)(^B1=)(^B2=) (^B3=)(^B4=)(^B5=)(^B6=)(^B7=)(^B8=)(^B9=)(^BA=)(^BB^1599)(^BC=19)] @$$}C79}@ ... (lots of escape characters here).com ... DOWNLOADS\1163528914JTUN_NAV2K6EN61113019.M25.FULL.ZIP\SERVERPATH=/segments/1163528914jtun_nav2k6en61113019.m25.full.zip DOWNLOADS\1163528914JTUN_NAV2K6EN61113019.M25.FULL.ZIP\STATUS=Complete DOWNLOADS\1163615981JTUN_NAV2K6EN61114034.M25.FULL.ZIP\CONTENT-LENGTH=678192 DOWNLOADS\1163615981JTUN_NAV2K6EN61114034.M25.FULL.ZIP\LAST-ACCESSED=1163643346 DOWNLOADS\1163615981JTUN_NAV2K6EN61114034.M25.FULL.ZIP\LAST-MODIFIED=Wed, 15 Nov 2006 18:44:09 GMT DOWNLOADS\1163615981JTUN_NAV2K6EN61114034.M25.FULL.ZIP\LOCALPATH=C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\LiveUpdate\Downloads\1163615981jtun_nav2k6en61114034.m25.full.zip DOWNLOADS\1163615981JTUN_NAV2K6EN61114034.M25.FULL.ZIP\SERVER=liveupdate.symantecliveupdate.com DOWNLOADS\1163615981JTUN_NAV2K6EN61114034.M25.FULL.ZIP\SERVERPATH=/segments/1163615981jtun_nav2k6en61114034.m25.full.zip ... ... and on, and on, and on... for another 4k lines. ...
Sounds like some other program is writing into the abook.mab file. The .bak creation can happen if some other program has locked the abook.mab file when we open it. Virus checkers can do the latter. Are you sure you have the latest version of Symantec Live Update?
I am positive that the Symatec Live update is the newest version at the time of the crashes for three of the five incidents. The other two users have other anti-virus software. We have instructed the users to disable mail scanning in Symantec (for the users using Symantec), enable the option in Thunderbird to allow Anti-Virus scanners, and the installations on two of the machines were performed by me so I know they were up-to-date. The other thing to note about anti-virus software is that we have two of the machines with the Corporate version of Symantec's AV software (10.x), and at least one with NAV 2k6 The previous (other) crashes had totally random garbage instead of readable text at the end of that file... which tells me it was probably machine code (I suspect from some other address space) so it was hard to tell if it was some sort of code dump, or really random garbage (data corruption vs. memory dump). Fortunately this last incident left us with over 4k lines of readable and sensible text. If a virus scanner has the address book open, wouldn't it throw an error message or stall the program instead of corrupting the address book (like in one of the other bugs that has been posted where they get an error message)? Also, I would wonder how it would be possible to have the file in-use by another process so it cannot be opened, yet still be able to be renamed to abook.mab.bak just the same. I don't want to read like I am discounting what you are saying or suggesting. It just doesn't make much sense to me that a file lock should cause corruption and destruction. I would expect something with that cause to simply error and die. I do appreciate the very fast response however :D, so please do not take my questions the wrong way. I have users breathing fire in my direction because I would not let them use MS Outlook / Express (it generates lots of garbage traffic and logging on my servers) so this is there little "See, I told you so" jab...
windows doesn't normally lock against rename, it locks against delete. you can rename a file that's open. i do it often while building gecko w/ gecko running. note that nothing prevents a system driver from running *in* process. so it's /possible/ that the antivirus *is* thunderbird as far as everything is concerned. if that's the case, then having the data randomly appear in thunderbird isn't really as unexpected.
ah, you're right, the corruption leads to the creation of the .bak file. Having the file locked can also lead to creation of the .bak file (by locked, I mean that TB can't get write access to the abook.mab file - but we can still copy the file to a backup in that case). In general, errors trying to open the abook.mab cause the creation of the .bak file. So it might simply be the corruption. Is it possible that you're getting two instances of TB running against the same profile? That's the only known way for TB to corrupt the .mab file itself. TB tries to prevent multiple instances running, but I think it can still happen. However, in that case, the corruption tends to look like the rest of the abook format, as if two programs were writing the same kind of data to the file, but colliding. That doesn't sound like what you're seeing, at least with that last corruption you noted. One reason I'm suspicious of your setup is that seem to be having this problem a lot, and we don't have any reports of this happening to other users at large. There was a nasty problem on some varieties of linux having to do with playing the new mail alert causing corruptions, but that was very linux-specific.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Well, Based on the suggestions in Comment #3 (sorry no link) I could see how it is possible that the A-V scanner be included within the process it's self. But I was under the impression that the A-V / application process would work off of the existing file handle until it is closed by the process an. I would have a couple of questions that lead off of that notion: 1.) Why would Thunderbird be the only application we use which manifests this issue?(of about 15-20, excluding all of the stuff these people may load at home, my bosses machine is on our network and does not have much extra stuff on it) 2.) Why only the abook.mab and (so far) never the collected addresses book? 3.) Does Windows' rename function leave the in-process copy of the A/V software working on the renamed file or the newly created file with the same name? And does it break the in-process A/V (due to missing file by the original name) and cause an unclean save ("memory dump") to the end of the renamed file? And one thing to note is that the corrupted information is always appended to the file and not dispersed throughout the file. Removing the corrupted portion generally returns the addresses to a usable (although possibly incorrect) format.
It is possible that we are getting two running instances of Thunderbird.exe, although I generally do not get a chance to check on the instances where this has occured outside of our central office since the users are trained by years of MS software to reboot before calling anyone. Earlier today I noticed another person with apparently this same issue here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=507838 Not to say that it is a popular problem, however I would probably call it critical due to data loss and down-time none the less. I have successfully gotten two copies of Thunderbird running on the one machine that I mentioned (my bosses) after it ate up 500+Mb of ram (at a different time than the address book issue). After clicking to close Thunderbird the UI and title bar disappeared like the process was closed and about 10 minutes later we clicked to open TB again, but it did not open. Checking taskman noted two running copies both using 0% CPU but the old process still had a huge amount of RAM allocated. The address book on this machine was still in-tact and ok after this problem. This problem spans at least between 1.5.0.8 and 1.5.0.9 I don't know if anyone was using an older version when this problem first started. The high CPU-usage / high memory consumption problem is an issue all by it's self and happens frequently (notably more often on TB installations using IMAP than POP3) but unless it is related I am trying to collect more information about that before opening a bug report or commenting on another bug.
renames affect the file name. handles are tied to the underlying data. so the locked file is the same file that was renamed, it might have a new name, but no one really cares. the point of the lock is to protect the locker from having the underlying data change out from under it. and this is secured by the lock. that the file name happens to change, is an "oh well".
That's what I thought. That leads me to believe that the A/V scan (I believe to be a read-only process) would finish up it's scan on the (newly) renamed file (since the handle still points to the same data it's self) and move on it's merry way. I would expect this type of scenario to cause a blank address book when Thunderbird opens (due to the new abook.mab file because of locking), but a clean and functional abook.mab.bak file with no "extra" text appended to it which could be moved back. I'm just not sure (in my limited non-programmer capacity) how data would be written out from some other location (I suspect RAM) into the end of a file due to locking or renaming a file while it is in-use by another (read-only?) process. Also the weird part about this... is that the data you see in that snippet is old... That crash happened yesterday for that piece of text I pasted, but the dates listed at the beginning of that text are from November of 2006. That makes me think that Liveupdate was running in another segment of ram, and that Thunderbird shouldn't have been reading or touching it but somehow did. But then again I could be possibly barking up the wrong tree entirely with this whole "from RAM" idea. Here is the end of the appended data from that same file (Notice the dates, it's getting newer, but not by much): ... B4C88FA}" and custom setting "VERSION" was "<NULL>". 11/22/2006, 1:24:00 AM GMT -> "<NULL>" == "12.2.0.13" evaluated to false. 11/22/2006, 1:24:00 AM GMT -> false || false evaluated to false. 11/22/2006, 1:24:00 AM GMT -> Calling GetProductPropByMoniker () 11/22/2006, 1:24:00 AM GMT -> GetProductProp failed, defaulting to "<NULL>". 11/22/2006, 1:24:00 AM GMT -> The setting for the following moniker "{053CE7E0-4A90-11d3-849D-005004210E7D}" and custom setting "VERSION" was "<NULL>". 11/22/2006, 1:24:00 AM GMT -> "<NULL>" == "2006.9.00.103" evaluated to false. 11/22/2006, 1:24 ... And it cuts off after that last "1:24" like the file was finally closed somehow.
Is there any form of logging or settings I could easily roll out to novice end-users on their computer to wait for this to happen again? Or would waiting until it happens again, and getting a copy of the abook.mab.bak file be sufficient to further the investigation into this issue? In my estimation I would guess that there is a good probability of getting an entirely different portion of code in the end of the next file (next crash) than Symantec's Liveupdate log (if that's what that was this time). Hopefully it will be the same type of text (indicating probability of the A/V software) or a different type, yet still partially english, (at least pointing to the source of the data) so I can identify what process or file this "extra" data is from. I will also be checking to see if I have an older file from a different user somewhere so I can identify what was in that file (from a different crash). Thanks everyone for the input so far! It is a frustrating problem and I appreciate all of the help and suggestions I can get!
Ah HA! I have located one of the old abook.mab.bak files from my boss's previous crash. It contains what looks to be e-mails, some with word document attachments. I can make out portions of our signature lines throughout the extra text (mostly html and MS-HTML/Word formatting). And once again it is at the end of the normal address book as well. Just for giggles I opened the impab.mab and impab.mab.bak files on this old corrupted installation (I had that machine sitting under a table disconnected for quite some time since that issue.) and lo and behold; the end of the impab.mab.bak file contains a few hundred blank lines followed by a huge pile of gibberish as well. Also, the beginning of the files differ slightly between the fields covered and the .mab file contains about 4 lines more than the .mab.bak file in the beginning and stops at field B7. The .mab.bak file goes until field 149 and contains another section with lots of addresses, this looks to be the group address lists). It looks to my untrained eye like something is overwriting the memory space for Thunderbird's address book, or vice versa, and whatever that impab.mab file is for... (sorry haven't looked into that) is also getting hosed in the same way. The users have not (yet) complained about the collected addresses getting messed up, but I don't imagine that they would even notice. Hopefully this can shed some light on where to look.
sysinternals.com has filemon.exe if you can wrap thunderbird.exe with a batch file that does something like: set NSPR_LOG_MODULES=all:5 set prefix=%temp%\mylog- for /l %a in (10,-1,1) do @if not exist %nspr_log_file%%a set NSPR_LOG_FILE=%prefix%%a if %nspr_log_file%. == . ( for /l %a in (100,-1,10) do @if not exist %nspr_log_file%%a set NSPR_LOG_FILE=%prefix%%a ) thunderbird
By the way, those files were from April 24th 2006 and I am almost positive that was version 1.5.0.2 we were using at that time.
We don't use the collect ab anymore, which probably explains why it's not affected. impab.mab isn't standard - is it something you created, or perhaps was created by importing from an other product? It's also not something we would write to often, if it's not changed or used. The memory space overwrite idea is unlikely - the address book is not memory mapped - all the little bits are stored in various places in the heap, so you'd have to trounce the heap, which leads to crashes, not file corruptions. It's much more likely that either something's writing to the file, or worse, the file system is getting horked (though why only the ab is affected would be a mystery).
Unfortunately this issue has been very random, and too intermittant for me to be able to reproduce myself, especially considering that we have other installations which have been running fine for about a year without this issue (ghosted installations on the same hardware as the one's which had an issue even, running the same A/V, the same desktop applications, and the same versions of Windows and service packs.) I wouldn't even know which machines I should watch, and only one user has had this issue happen to her twice. The first time she only lost her personal address book and not her "Imported Outlook Express" address book. So we consolidated her addresses down to one address book after the crash, and then she lost them all the second time (we didn't touch collected addresses book). Will the filemon application referenced in Comment #11 require loading each time with Thunderbird and someone watching it for issues? I fear that by trying to have my end users try to watch for this issue they will not know what to look at, or know when to call me since the address books did not disappear until they closed Thunderbird and then re-opened it. (That leads me to believe that the corruption happened during Thunderbird's close, and Thunderbird simply did some "cleanup" when it started the next time which resulted in the blank address book being created.) Is this the best possible method to gather information about this issue? If so I will just have to soak it up and try and get that setup on all of the user's machines, but that could end up being very time consuming. I have identified the impab.mab file as being the addresses imported from Outlook Express. Only on this machine were addresses imported from a previous mail client as the others were new installations and users were instructed not to import addresses so I can't think that OE or the import is to blame... The only reason I keep looking to memory problems is that other (unrelated) application's data keeps showing up in these files. For instance Word documents, Symantec Live update history logs, and ASCII characters (which look to me like you opened a .exe file in notepad). I am the last person to be able to positively confirm or deny the possibility that it is memory related, since I don't write any of the code in Thunderbird or know how the heaps and stacks work in Windows memory management, it's only an estimation. Also, it is only these particular files in this particular application which has been affected and running a disk check and hard disk test (ontrack) have both passed with no errors. I am hoping there is something viable to test for, or some pattern of similarity I can use to make this issue manifest it's self as needed. At this point we have: 1.) Same general Thunderbird setup (one IMAPS, one SMTPS accounts) on all accounts. All used the Default profile and default address books (with two exceptions of this imported Outlook Express address book on two of 5 machines). 2.) No extensions or themes in use on the machines in question. 3.) Random data from both Thunderbird and other applications appended to the abook.mab and impab.mab files every time the address book has disappeared. Corruption has not been dispersed throughout the address book, but may have overwritten some legitimate mailing-list data at the end of the address book since the mailing lists were not recovered. 4.) Neither Thunderbird, nor Windows, was reported to have crashed or acted abnormally before this issue. 5.) Closing and reopening Thunderbird has always been reported as the last step before the user noticed the data loss. Length of time the application was closed varies from time to reboot to many days. 6.) Anti-Virus applications differ in brand, maker and version, but the symptoms are the same. Symantec Corp v10.x is the most common, but many other "ghosted" installations run without a hitch. (Most with problems are not ghost copies.) 7.) The hardware was less than 6 months old on about half of the machines with this problem. 8.) All machines are Windows XP machines with Service pack 2 installed (and updated at the time of the crash). 9.) Hardware checked out ok after the loss on two of the machines. Windows event log does not display any errors around the time of the problem. 10.) The other applications which the data came from were not reported to have crashed or had any issues around the time of these problems. Most likely no other application received this type of mangling of data to it's own files (assumption). 11.) Users e-mail folders vary in size from 38MB to 6.3Gb with most being below 500Mb. 12.) Known versions to display this issue 1.5.0.2, 1.5.0.8, 1.5.0.9. Other versions (newer than 1.5.0.2) possible but unknown and unconfirmed. I guess I am just not understanding *what* could be writing to this file... *why* the address book is the only data file afflicted by this issue... *where* to start with diagnosis or testing... or *how* to reproduce the problem reliably. I don't have the answers... that's for sure. I really don't have a terribly strong background in system memory management on the levels of heaps, stacks, allocation, locking, cleanup, routines, etc. So please bear with me if it takes a little while for me to get the gist of the suggestions. Thanks again for all of your time. I appreciate it a lot. And even though they probably wouldn't say it to my face my staff will appreciate this too if we can get to the bottom of the issue. :D
>11.) Users e-mail folders vary in size from 38MB to 6.3Gb with most being below >500Mb. I hope you mean the total size of their folders, and not an individual folder! 4GB is the limit for any given folder in TB (and maybe just 2GB with 1.5.0.x). There's no limit to the total size of all the folders. I assume the user profiles are stored in the standard place on the users' C:\ hard drive? I don't expect to really find anything significant from this, but if you want to send me one of your affected user's prefs.js, I could look at it.
I can clarify that one. The total folder size for the users main folder, when measured server-side, is in that range. No individual folder is greater than 1.2Gb on the server and even that sized folder is unique to the CEO's account, most are smaller. The users have been strongly discouraged from saving many e-mails in the inbox folder and are instead provided with an "Archives" sub-folder to store their e-mail in (also on the IMAP server). The user profiles are stored in the default location that Thunderbird puts them during installation C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\<random>.default\ Unfortunately, I only have the prefs.js from the machine after it was "fixed" by re-installation (this was the machine that had the issue first and has not been used since a few months after (so it still had the .bak files but everything else was wiped). It was decomissioned a few months later as it had become infested with pop-up software and sorely needs to have Windows reloaded at this point. I had only saved the files which had duplicates with .bak extensions at that time (abook and impab).
That 2/4 GB limit applies to local folders (and offline imap stores), but online imap folders can be as big as the server allows.
That is good to know. I used to work for a computer service and repair company. Our customers ran into the 2Gb folder limit plenty of times with Outlook / Outlook Express / Exchange so I have my users try and avoid getting anywhere close to that size "just in case" because cleanup from that issue is a big $#@^ headache. Not to mention the e-mails which can become lost forever that way. Is it possible to build an otherwise "standard" 1.5.0.9 version of Thunderbird with debug logging enabled or log-to-file? Something I could distribute to my users (with a regular installer) which they can use on a daily basis and would allow me to go back to the logs if I have this happen again (Since it is very random) I don't want to change the code base too much, but we need something realistic we can do to capture more information about this bug and get you all what you need. I really wish I could reproduce this issue on-demand.
filemon can be run at startup with its filters preconfigured using its registry key. unfortunately you'll have to manually save its log (which means you need some hint of a problem). as for nspr logging, that'll generate gigabytes of data (afaik there's no limit here, since it's only appending) and the code i listed earlier is mostly sufficient (except you might need to double certain %s if you use it in a batch file).
i have also the same problem. but in my case it began when there was a electrical blackout and the computer shout down not in order. then also the addres book and the inbox came empty . Irestored it by erasing the binary data and random characters in the end of the abok.mab file. since then almost every time when i reopen Thunderbird only the addres book erased. when i decreased the contacts it hapend less frequencly, but stil hapens. now i disable the AV from scaning the mail files, I hope it works. netta
This is the first example stated in my replies
This file needs to be unzipped, contents are in plain text
This example contains e-mails, word documents, and other code, much of the e-mail contents is missing because the e-mails have been de-sensitized so I can post them and the 300kb limit for files does not allow me to upload the entire file. Had to be zipped due to size limits. Please note, this document contained about 400kb of more garbage text than included in the end of the file
The first two example files are from the same machine, different crashes. The third file was from the TB 1.5.0.2 version my boss was using on a different machine entirely (a while back).
Almost one year ago I was experiencing the same problems as you with Thunderbird (address book corruption) on Gentoo Linux. I think the version I was using then was 1.5.0.2. I had 3 e-mail POP-3 accounts and some RSS feeds, but I was actively using only one of the accounts. The problems suddenly arose when I set up a custom notification sound, more or less with the same patterns as yours. They suddenly disappeared when I removed it, so I suspected on sound. Digging a little on the garbage on the corrupted address books, I realized that each time the garbage in the files was the sound file content! The problem was not related to compilation flags because I removed all the optimizations from the compiler (and even some related libraries), and the bug remained. I have not set up the notification sound since then, so I cannot tell if the bug is related or the same as yours. I have not had address book corruption problems since the sound notification deactivation.
José, that's a known problem that was fixed, I think in 1.5.07 or 8...but you definitely diagnosed it correctly.
I just wanted to post a refresh to this bug as I have been contacted twice outside of this bug report (by someone reading the report) to have me fix their address book recently. I was unable to get the version information for Thunderbird from them as they spoke very broken English. Please! If you are reading this report DO NOT SEND ME MAIL DIRECTLY! Please report your issue here to confirm if this is an issue or not in the current / recent versions of Thunderbird. For anyone trying to fix their address books a general overview of the procedure (using the default abook.mab file as an example): Note: I will assume you know where your profile folder is located on your machine. If you do not you will need to lookup the instructions for locating it before hand. This will take about 10 minutes to complete if successful. 1.) Backup (copy) your profile folder to another safe location. This is extremely important in case something goes wrong (and is generally a good idea anyways). 2.) Open your abook.mab file using notepad (or other ASCII text editor) and look at the formatting of the items in it. (If it is blank or contains very very little information, you may need to perform this operation on the abook.mab.bak file if it contains the contacts you were looking for and save it as abook.mab after the editing steps below.) If you have the right file continue on... 3.) Scroll down until you find blocks of text surrounded by matching pairs of text which is similar to: @$$}29}@ (In case the text gets messed up in my post it is: Ampersand-Dollar sign-Dollar sign-Right Curly Brace-Incrementally Increasing Number-Right Curly Brace-Ampersand) without spaces. Note: You should be able to make out some of your contact card's information in these text blocks. IMMEDIATELY AFTER the last complete pair of these text blocks (make sure there is two matching blocks) highlight and delete everything up-to the end of the file and save this file. If you started from abook.mab.bak because abook.mab was blank or did not contain the right information save it as abook.mab. 5.) Delete, rename, or move the abook.mab.bak file (if present) in your profile directory. I would suggest moving it to your desktop until you can confirm that you no longer need it. 6.) Open Thunderbird and then open your address book. If your contacts are back, which they should be if all went well, congratulations! You are done. If not there may be additional garbage appended to your abook file or it may be more heavily corrupted than what I have experienced with this bug. In this case please keep your backup of your profile folder which you created at the start of this procedure (you did backup right?) and post here and I will try and help you when I can. If you can confirm that ALL of your contacts came back to your address book and everything is running great you may delete your backup copy of your profile if you like. I strongly suggest making a backup of your profile on a fairly regular basis. Please see here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup for some instructions. - Robert
Sorry, there was no number 4 step in the above process, I just got my numbering wrong. - Robert
I have the same problem when my computer closes down - twice now in three days ... it's a complicated problem to fix - or to try to ... will try again today ... has Mozilla attempted to fix this bug. What happens is just the addresses from my "Personal Address Book" are deleted, not the other addresses in other folders. Thanks for the help in this site. Ken
I also had this problem. This is the sad tale: I received a message with half a dozen recipients, spread between CC: and BCc: fields. Then I hit "Reply to all". I received an error message saying something went wrong with the address book (sorry, didn't take note of the exact message) and a new one was created, being the old one renamed to .bak. This new ab has no contacts at all. I opened the .bak address book file, and there are messages and attachments inserted among the contacts. I'll try to remove as much as I can from this garbage to have it up and running again. I tried to import data from the .bak file, but it can only find garbage... I'm using TB 2.0.0.9 (20071031) pt-BR over Win2k SP4. I also have Sameplace, XMPP4Moz, Lightning and Talkback extensions. Unfortunately, "Safe mode" and "No extension" options don't work for some reason (Bug 406820). Hope this helps. Best regards
No way. The garbage was mixed within actual data, and I can't really tell what exactly to delete. I tried something, but I got the same error and another .bak file. At least now I have the message (translated word to word from pt-BR): One of your address book catalog files (arquivos abook.mab files) couldn't be read. A new abook.mab file will be created and a backup of the old file, named abook.mab.mak, will be created in the same directory. I'd be glad if someone could help me recovering the data. Unfortunately, the info in the Knowledge Base seemed not enough. Many thanks, Emerson
dep. bug 299346 (perhaps)
Assignee: mscott → nobody
Depends on: 299346
Keywords: dataloss
I'd risk to say that, before my non-programmer eyes, bug 299346 and this one are the same stuff with different descriptions. Both tell about corruption of the abook file. The only differences are: In bug 299346 we don't have information on how the poster's file looked like after corruption. Maybe the same thing happened - garbage was inserted or appended - but it seems we'll never know. The actions which led to corruption. Even though, this bug itself has more than one reason - several IMAP clients with big folders, computer crashes, replying to invalid addresses, etc. IMHO, the bugs should be duped. I'd suggest bug 299346 be duped to this one, because of the way better description and debugging and also because bug 299346 poster is gone. (So far, never happened again, so no news - Using TB 2.0.0.16 (20080708). But it seems a failure in memory handling, whatever...) Thanx.
Ken, does your problem happen even if you always shut down thunderbird before restarting/shutting down your computer? Emerson, has your problem happened more than once? There are at least 3 major symptoms (excluding lost profile and profile sharing issues): 1. lost at windows shutdown 2. corrupted on shutdown 3. corrupted during operation with variations on each. They could all have the same cause, but until the cause is proven via testing and/or patches, bugs with different symptoms should remain open. But let's revisit this and other bugs * bug 299346 and comment 30 are known to be related to shutdown * bug 435110 and bug 420423 - which may be bug 299346 * bug 394797 (soon to be closed for lack of response) Thunderbird shutdown issue might not get fixed until underlying gecko shutdown process is fixed. I don't have a bug# handy. Might also be mitigated by moving AB to sqllite. david mentioned some time ago that these problems are rare, and that still looks to be the case, with only those I mentioned above from AB bugs filed in the last 600 days http://tinyurl.com/6bvekc [And there are also rare examples like the fixed Bug 433264 -- Address book doesn't appear after upgrade -- where the AB didn't change (nothing lost, changed or moved) but trunk versus branch programs used different reference, so it wasn't accessible.]
(In reply to comment #35) > Emerson, has your problem happened more than once? Nope. > There are at least 3 major symptoms (excluding lost profile and profile sharing > issues): > 1. lost at windows shutdown > 2. corrupted on shutdown > 3. corrupted during operation Thinking a bit about programming, I have to agree with you. The three different situations may have three different causes, so three different bugs seems good. Sad that the problems are that hard to reproduce. BTW, I found a file named Contatos.ldif and its contents seem to be my lost contacts (!). Is there a way to merge it in my current abook.mab file? Thanx
Pls forget my last question above. Sorry, quite stupid one! I gladly exported my contacts a while before losing the address book. Tools-Import-Address Book, etc., and I've just recovered most contacts. Regards
Robert, (or anyone else) do you see this any more? bug 364795 has extensive information - I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned. --- I'm not sure there's anyone else left to confirm whether this problem is gone, or still exists. (ken's address is dead and Emerson only experience the problem once) If no one confirmations seeing this in the last 2 yeras, and Bienvenu believes there's nothing left here to pursue, then we can close this bug
Whiteboard: [closeme 2011-03-01]
Chance brought it about, that I get a call from on of my customers today: Her addresses are gone... After quick checking I discovered that her abook.mab file was damaged and now contains "garbage". As far as she can tell me, there was no unusual or suspicious behaviour as well as no crash or anything like that. She uses Thunderbird 3.1.7.
what add-ons does she have installed? is there any recognizable text in the "garbage"?
Whiteboard: [closeme 2011-03-01]
TBird v11.0.1 I spent some hours today making add'l Address lists for mailings. I then decided to visit the TB addons page to see if there were any addons for managing/using address lists. When I closed, what I mistakenly thought was the addons page, TBird closed. When I restarted all of the new address books I created today, and all of the new additions to my main Address books were missing. Big bug, it seems to me. Almost a showstopper. Also, contrary to this link, http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_address_books_between_profiles, there were no *.mab.bak files in the profile folder.
Thunderbird suddenly wo'nt recognise or list my personal address book. I'm using version 12.0.1 with windows XP. The file abook.map is in the profiles folder. It's 52 kb in size and I've looked at it with Notebook. I don't really know what I'm looking for but there doesn't appear to be any of the garbage appended that has been refered to in previous comments about this bug. I can't find any data that Robert refers to in his comment of 18 Sept 2007. Can anyone help please? Trevor
I've had this happen twice. With respect to the attachment of 2007-1-14, this same type of garbage can occur extensively throughout the file, not just at the end. The address book is a real mess. There are also other several types of empty garbage records that are sprinkled liberally throughout the address book. Excerpts are attached, for what it's worth. I can also supply two complete corrupted address books if that will help. This bug is marked as depending on bug 299346, which is closed. I hope that doesn't mean that work ceases on this bug, because it's not fixed.
I compared the contents of History.mab with the corrupted Abook.mab and found the corrupted data (see attachment). I deleted the corrupted data and Tbird then recognised the Personal address book and listed it. I'm back in business! If they can't fix the bug, then it would help if Tbird at least saved the Abook to a .bak file so that it could be recovered when it gets corrupted.
(saw another cent report of this - in getsatisfaction? - and now I can't find it)
bug 841598, the redesign, offers hope to kill this off
Depends on: tb-ab-rewrite
See Also: → 1440979
Depends on: 148169
See Also: → 1473006

We're not using mork address books anymore.

Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 5 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
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