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Snow Leopard mixes up contact information in mail and address book

Since installing Snow Leopard, I have had several incidents where apple mail app substitutes the name of a contact (on an email I have received) with someone else's contact information. For example, "John Smith" is cc'd in the email that is sent to me, but "Bob Jones"'s name and contact info from my address book appears in mail. The same email on my iphone does not exhibit this problem and shows the proper information. This is particularly troublesome because if I reply all without noticing the problem, the email thread goes to an unintended recipient.
Issue #2: A similar but different issue has also occurred. Address book app has mixed up the contact detail for multiple contacts. So, mutliple contacts show the wrong contact detail. Shortly thereafter, address book crashed and when it re-opened the problem was no longer occuring.
Anyone else experiencing issue #1 or #2? Any help?

24" iMac, Mac OS X (10.6)

Posted on Sep 2, 2009 2:42 PM

35 replies

cwp

Level 1

4 points

Oct 9, 2009 8:04 PM in response to David Margolin

I tried this and so far, so good!!!

I went into ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook and removed all of the "bad"/bogus files and just kept:

AddressBook-v22.abcddb

Note, before doing that I backed up my entire AddressBook. After deleting the files and rebooting -- for safe measure, the incident hasn't re-occurred.

Oct 9, 2009 8:22 PM in response to bezanson

I tried this, but when I went to open Mail from the Dock, Mail opened but the Dock was frozen, with the Mail icon magnified. I restored the Address book Library files via Time Machine, but the Dock is still messed up when I open Mail. Not a good solution in my case....

Oct 12, 2009 9:17 PM in response to David Margolin

Bumping this up, as it continues to be a problem.

I even dumped all my AddressBook data and related files and restored a pre-snow leopard version, but the problem returned.

Seems to happen most on my iMac, and not the MacBook, for whatever reason...

Oct 14, 2009 4:16 AM in response to Michael Zimmer3

I had the same problem. I quit Mail, dragged the com.apple.mail.plist file to the desktop, relaunched Mail (which just showed my .me account :-0 !), dragged the original .plist file back to Library/Preferences and replaced the new file with the old......... et voila... problem gone.

For now ;))

decipher

Level 1

5 points

Nov 2, 2009 12:52 PM in response to David Margolin

Quick question for the group: Are any of you using Entourage with the Sync Services option? I've also tried all the above with no success, and the only other item I see accessing my Address Book is Entourage. I haven't disabled it yet, but wanted to see if anyone else with Entourage is having this issue as well.

Snow Leopard mixes up contact information in mail and address book