Some contacts in Mail are greyed-out

Nope, no help. But thanks anyway.

I've tried everything so far but I literally cannot stop more than half of my contacts from being greyed out. I can see I'm going to have to abandon Mac Mail completely and go straight to the webmail server. It's absolutely pathetic for a brand new OS, quite unbelievable. The greying-out is apparently completely random, there are contacts available that I haven't emailed in ten years yet my regulars are unavailable. I'm pretty shocked tbh, this is an issue that apple need to sort out.

Yes I will

Weird thing is - I just tried to delete one of the greyed-out contacts from the Contacts App, in order to replace it with a completely new one - and although I am offered the option to delete, Contacts refuses to delete it, and it remains. The greyed-out ones are totally locked.

The new one I created - literally identical to the greyed-out one - is, however, available to use in Mac Mail. Work that one out. What possible difference is there between the two?

Does this mean I have to manually add all the greyed-out ones again even though there is no legitimate reason for any of them to have become unavailable? And, having done so, I then have to look at a sea of duplicates because Contacts won't allow me to delete the greyed-out ones?

Thanks. I think I am going to scrub every entry from Contacts and re-imports as vcards. Is it actually possible to empty Contacts of entries? Because it was preventing me from deleting the greyed-out ones.

I had a webchat with two different Apple support people about this yesterday, and the sum total of their expertise was to "switch it off and switch it back on again." Really. Unbelievable.

The Mac. Switch the Mac off and switch it back on again. "This process will cut us off so if it does please make a note of the case number..." Two different people said the same thing. They clearly have no idea of how to deal with the issue, and from what I've read it seems to be an ongoing thing with Contacts and .abbu files.

P. Phillips, you have fixed it - thank you. I clicked the Contacts button within the iCloud dialogue that you have highlighted above, and switched it off. Then I closed and reopened Mail and had a look - the problem persisted. Then I clicked the Contacts button again, and switched it back on. This time I had a new dialogue box appear, which asked if I wished to merge my contacts with those on iCloud. Even though I don't use iCloud, I don't have an iPhone and I don't have any contacts stored there, I clicked "Yes."

Then I once again closed Mail, reopened it and all the contacts are once again available. What's more I am able to delete the ones in Contacts that were previously locked.

I didn't need to do any of the safe Mode stuff (thankfully) - in the end it was the simple matter of switching it off and back on again to force an iCloud merge (like I say, even though I have no contacts on iCloud).

I'll keep an eye on it, but I'm hopeful the issue has now gone for good.

P. Phillips have a virtual beer on me. I hope this thread helps others in a similar situation.