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addressbook

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  • Last reply by sfhowes

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I just installed Thunderbird on a second laptop. How does one sync the address books of the two installations? I tried exporting the address book from Thunderbird installed on my older laptop and then importing it onto the freshly installed Thunderbird on my new laptop. My old address books are just the two of Personal Address Book and Collected Addresses. Two problems arose. First it creates on the new installation four address books, two Personal Address Book and two Collected Addresses. Second, in the exported files, the addresses are sorted by last name. When they are imported they are no longer sorted by last name. While they are sorted by name, they are not consistently sorted. Clearly, I am missing something obvious.

I just installed Thunderbird on a second laptop. How does one sync the address books of the two installations? I tried exporting the address book from Thunderbird installed on my older laptop and then importing it onto the freshly installed Thunderbird on my new laptop. My old address books are just the two of Personal Address Book and Collected Addresses. Two problems arose. First it creates on the new installation four address books, two Personal Address Book and two Collected Addresses. Second, in the exported files, the addresses are sorted by last name. When they are imported they are no longer sorted by last name. While they are sorted by name, they are not consistently sorted. Clearly, I am missing something obvious.

Chosen solution

To copy Personal Address Book and Collected Addresses from one computer to another, copy abook.mab and history.mab from one profile folder to another, overwriting the existing files:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_address_books_between_profiles

If you actually want to sync contacts between computers, one method is to establish a 'cloud' address book with a gmail account, then sync it with TB with the help of an add-on:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/gcontactsync/

To sync an outlook.com address book, there are other add-ons:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/tzpush/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/tbsync/

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I am guessing sorting is not important. after all you change it by clicking on the heading for the items to be sorted. But the easiest way I know of is just copy the files. but only easy to those that know about files and folder on a computer.

Another option is a couple of add-ons. More function for address book and card book. The first has been around a long time and extends Thunderbird address book. The second is an address book replacement that really does modernize the address book by adopting the standards based vcard format for data storage. and a tab based user interface.

Morefunctions here https://freeshell.de//~kaosmos/morecols-en.html

Cardbook here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/cardbook/?src=hp-dl-featured

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Chosen Solution

To copy Personal Address Book and Collected Addresses from one computer to another, copy abook.mab and history.mab from one profile folder to another, overwriting the existing files:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_address_books_between_profiles

If you actually want to sync contacts between computers, one method is to establish a 'cloud' address book with a gmail account, then sync it with TB with the help of an add-on:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/gcontactsync/

To sync an outlook.com address book, there are other add-ons:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/tzpush/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/tbsync/