Repair Corrupt Thunderbird Address Book In An Easy Way

Contacts are really important for any user working in an organization to maintain the client to client relationships. It stores all the contact details related to business purpose. As Nowadays, email is one of the best means of communication. so Contacts are maintained in the address book of the Email application.  Among all available Email applications, Mozilla Thunderbird is one of the popular Email application used by the user. It stores all its contacts in Thunderbird with .mab extension. Here we discussed how we can repair corrupt Thunderbird Address Book file to get back contact details. However, it maintains two different address book files i.e. abook.mab (Personal) and history.mab (Collected) file.

Thus, corrupted Address Book can create a big trouble for a user. Therefore, in this, post all possible solution to repair corrupt Thunderbird Address book are covered.

Why Address Book of Thunderbird Gets Corrupted?

There can be various possible reasons that lead to corruption in the Address Book File. Due to this corruption, it becomes important for a user to repair damaged Thunderbird Address Book File. However, the most common reasons are discussed below:

• The major factor that may result in address book corruption is damaged profile of Mozilla Thunderbird. However, if the profile is damaged then it can harm the complete mailbox including the address book.
• If there is a corruption in Contact file, then, other possible reason could be the virus attack or system crash on the local system. It can also result in lead corruption in the MAB file of Thunderbird.

How to Repair Corrupt Thunderbird Address Book Manually

In this segment of the post, we discussed different sol manual solutions to restore & recover corrupted Thunderbird Address Book files. With the help of this method, a user can try to easy tricks to fix the contacts file.

Method 1: Recover Corrupt Thunderbird Address Book From A Damaged Profile

If a user is having a backup of the Thunderbird profile, then can go for this solution. Now, to repair corrupt Thunderbird Address Book from a damage profile follow the steps given below:

• First, a user needs to Copy and Paste the Address book file from its default location to some other secure location of the system.
• After that, Set up Thunderbird application on the system and configure a new account in it.
• Then, Navigate to the Address Book tab of Thunderbird and click on File >> New >> Address Book Contacts option respectively.

After that keeps on creating new contacts until it reaches the same number as in damaged profile.

• Now, Exit the Thunderbird application and then locate the profile folder. In this, there are two MAB files that are named as abook1.mab, abook2.mab. All these profiles are empty and need to be copied in the new profile

Note: Please make sure that old profile and new profile have the same name.

• After that, you need to Open Mozilla Thunderbird Application >> Address Book Tab.

If the above procedure works well then, the Address Book of the new profile is filled with contents of old one and user can easily customize the names according to their choice.

Method 2: Repair Corrupt Thunderbird Address Book by Editing the Corrupted Portion

The corrupted Address Book File (MAB file) gets named as abook.mab.bak. Therefore, to recover corrupt Mozilla Thunderbird Address files, follow the steps given below:

• First of all, close the Thunderbird application or if already closed directly go to the profile location:

   Windows XP: C:/document and settings\*user name*\application data\Thunderbird\profiles\*random string.profilename*
Windows 8.1/ 8/ 7:

C:\Users\admin\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\f6gm8qf5.default

1. 1. After that, make all hidden files visible to the user.
   2. Then, open the file with .mab.bak extension with Text Editor and then remove all corrupt data appended to it similar to below image.

3. Normal file Data similar to below image.

4. After erasing all the appended data, save abook.mab file back to its primary location
After using this procedure, it can be possible that corruption from Contacts Book gets removed, you are able to data from Corrupt Thunderbird Address book File.

Manual  Method Fail to Repair Thunderbird Address Book Corruption?

There are various limitations that a user might encounter while repairing contacts file from Address book file, some are discussed below:

1. No manual provides a guaranteed solution to repair corrupt Thunderbird Address Book
2. There are chances of some data loss also while using manual approach.
3. The manual procedure is very time-consuming and hard to perform.

Trouble-Free Solution to Recover Corrupt Thunderbird Address Book

As discussed above, there are various manual solutions available that a user can use to repair Mozilla Address Book corruption. However, there are various situations in which the manual procedure fails sometimes. Therefore, to overcome all these limitations, one can go for a third-party tool i.e. MAB Converter. Simple Interface & User-friendly designed to understand features of Software.To preserve addresses, a user can migrate Thunderbird Address Book format.

Conclusion

As address book is very important for any user.  Discussed Manual solutions can help a user to recover data using Text Editor. As manual solution has some limitations, a third party tool is also suggested that a user can use to have a guaranteed solution.

Therefore, corrupted Address Book can become a big trouble. Hence, after understanding the requirement of the user to repair corrupt Thunderbird Address Book.