Thunderbird deleting Address Books - problem

I migrated from Netscape 4.76 to Thunderbird and it went well as far as mail is concerned. It also set up an Address Book with the name of "OCC" which is the name of one of my Netscape Address Books. Prior to exporting and importing the Netscape Address Books I attempted to delete the empty "OCC" address book and the DELETE button is greyed out. How can I delete this empty Address Book on Thunderbird?

Thank you,
CaptainDick

 

Welcome to the Forum captaindick1937

Captain,

Open Thunderbird, and click on "Address Book "
Right click the OCC Address Book in the left panel
Select: Delete

That should do it!

 

Thunderbird - Cannot delete Address Book

Thank you for replying, Ramona,

I had tried that in the past and tried it again, DELETE is still
grayed out.

Any other thoughts?

Dick

 

If you highlight your address books, one at a time, you should have three: Personal, Collected, and OCC. If you right click on the first two, the delete function is grayed out, as they are in, by default. The OCC address book should be independent, and deletable. I have six other imported address books which are deletable. Just for the heck of it, I created a new address book, which I called "General ". I, then, moved all of three addresses from one of my imported AB, which, I, then, deleted. Now the hard drive Thunderbird profile folder had one fewer impab.mab (imported AB), and a new abook-1.mab. That corresponds to my "General" AB, which is deletable. So, check the profile for any extra file, and delete it, with TB closed. To verify that you are looking at the correct file right click on the MAB file, and open with Wordpad or Notepad. If you see only one abook.mab file, then OCC is not an independent AB.

 

Thunderbird - Cannot delete Address Book

A bit more history. After installing TB I exported my "OCC" Address Book from Netscape and imported it into TB. When I looked at TB's Address Books there were two OCC. I attempted to delete the empty one and could not so I deleted the one I imported (1,100 entries) and it deleted ok. When I tried to delete the empty "OCC" Address Book DELETE is grayed out.

Now, under Windows Explorer I look at my profile and this is what I see:

Abook.mab
History.mab

and

OCC.NA2 (size is 3,920kb)

May I just delete the OCC.NA2 file?

Thanks again.
Dick

 

Dick,

Absolutely! Delete that OCC.NA2 file, and let us know if that worked. It should!

 

Thunderbird - Cannot delete Address Book

Hi Ramona,

Sorry to say it did not work. I did, howerver find the following in the
prefs.js file:

user_pref( "ldap_2.servers.OCC.csid ", "iso-8859-1 ");
user_pref( "ldap_2.servers.OCC.description ", "OCC ");
user_pref( "ldap_2.servers.OCC.dirType ", 2);
user_pref( "ldap_2.servers.OCC.filename ", "abook.mab ");
user_pref( "ldap_2.servers.OCC.isOffline ", false);
user_pref( "ldap_2.servers.OCC.locale ", "English_United States ");
user_pref( "ldap_2.servers.OCC.replication.lastChangeNumber ", 0);
user_pref( "ldap_2.servers.OCC4x.PalmCategoryId ", 0);
user_pref( "ldap_2.servers.OCC4x.description ", "OCC 4.x ");
user_pref( "ldap_2.servers.OCC4x.dirType ", 2);
user_pref( "ldap_2.servers.OCC4x.filename ", "OCC.na2 ");
user_pref( "ldap_2.servers.OCC4x.isOffline ", false);
user_pref( "ldap_2.servers.OCC4x.locale ", "English_United States ");
user_pref( "ldap_2.servers.OCC4x.position ", 16);
user_pref( "ldap_2.servers.OCC4x.replication.lastChangeNumber ", 0);
user_pref( "ldap_2.servers.OCCMonthly.position ", 0);
user_pref( "ldap_2.servers.OCC_1.position ", 0);

Can I delete these?

Thanks

 

You probably can delete those lines, but I would not do it at this time.
Just going back to what you did in first place. How did you export the address book. I don't have A NS4.x, but the AB should be exported as a .ldif file, which are easily imported by a variety of mail clients. You should not have had the .na2 file in first place. But, I am finding the .ldif files which I imported in the TB profile folder. But, as I said before, I have impab.mab files which were converted from the imported file. Right click|open with Wordpad to view the contents. One of them could be your bane.

 

I exported from Netscape 4.76 as an ldif and imported into TB as an ldif.

I should say also, that this is only a test system which I am checking
out prior to doing the real conversion.

In attempting to reset everything I uninstalled TB thinking that all of it would
be deleted only to find out the the profile is kept. Any problem uninstalling
TB and manually deleting the profile and starting all over again?

Thank you.

 

Dick,

You can safely delete the Thunderbird folder located here:
C:\Documents and Settings\user_name\Application Data\Thunderbird

You can do it from the Profile Manager, electing to delete files as well. Or manually delete the Thunderbird folder.

This time around, before importing the OCC LDIF file, ensure that the OCC Address Book doesn't already exist.

 

Thank you all for all of the advice.

After discussing the above with a friend of mine who migrated to TB a while ago, he said that he had a similar problem with an extra Address Book that could not be deleted and he decided to just ignore it. I have deleted files and uninstalled TB, reinstalled TB and imported the Address Books and will live with the extra "problem" address book. Everything else seems to be working well and I am learning more and more about the various options.

I thought that since I installed Netscape 4.76 many years ago it was time to move on.

One final question though: occasionally I travel with a laptop and would like to move my TB e-mail to it before traveling and restore it back to my desktop upon my return. Is there a recommended procedure for doing this?

Thank you.
Dick

 

Dick don't have to move anything. You, only, need to set up TB in your laptop. Next, if you want all your mail there, you can copy the Inbox from your desktop, and paste it in your laptop profile. You don't have to do that with all your mail, but you can do it if your Inbox is of moderate size. If you travel for X number of days, set up your desktop to keep messages on server for, at least, X+4 or so. So, when you come back you come download to the desktop all your mail. So, there is no reason to move anything.
As for the address books, you can export and save all address books as .ldif files, on a CD, or something. Then you can copy the .ldif files into your laptop HD, and then import the AB.
In my experience, I had problems only with one address book in the .ldif format, and it was a stab in the dark. I was able to export it from AOL Communicator, a standalone mail client, related to Netscape, which never went public. I stopped testing it when AOL went Microsoft, but I was able to import about 70% of the address from my wife's huge address book (well over one thousand addresses). I had to clean it up, but my wife is still using in Thunderbird.