How to Delete Smart Group that can NOT be Selected

Question

How to Delete Smart Group that can NOT be Selected

I have a Smart Group called “Greeting” that selects contacts that have a birthday or anniversary within a day and have at least one email address. It was working flawlessly for over a year.

Yesterday I swapped the (internal) disk that contained my user directory because it was failing. I restored all my files on the new media and am not aware of any other problems. Another Smart Group work correctly, but clicking manually on Greeting crashes Contacts and produces this crash report:

Process: Contacts [49708]

Path: /System/Applications/Contacts.app/Contents/MacOS/Contacts

Identifier: com.apple.AddressBook

Version: 2498.5.1

Build Info: AddressBook_executables-2498005001000000~48

Code Type: X86-64 (Native)

Parent Process: launchd [1]

User ID: 502

Date/Time: 2023-12-01 15:39:39.2630 -0600

OS Version: macOS 12.7.1 (21G920)

Report Version: 12

Anonymous UUID: 78FFB0AE-1E0C-090C-20E9-80F4DD379CCA

Time Awake Since Boot: 81000 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)

Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Application Specific Information:

abort() called

Accessing it with an AppleScript command throws a -609 error:

set peopleToCheck to people of group strSmartGroupForPeopleHavingBirthdayOrAnniversaryTodayTomorrowOrYesterday

Error: “Contacts got an error: Connection is invalid. (-609)”

Given that I can’t select the Smart Group Greeting, how do I delete it and create a new one?

Thank you for your help.

iMac 27″, macOS 12.7

Posted on Dec 1, 2023 2:08 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Nello Lucchesi Author

Level 2

224 points

Dec 1, 2023 9:08 PM in response to BDAqua

None of techniques in that thread (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4230473?answerId=19347224022#19347224022 ) worked for me.

What worked for me was:

Quit Contacts application.
Turn of all contact synching with Google, iCloud, etc.
Delete the entire directory ~Library/Application Support/AddressBook
Turn back on all contact synching.
Launch Contacts application (All contacts as well as all Smart Groups will be gone.)
While VERY patiently waiting for contacts to download from sync sources, re-create every desired Smart Group.

There simply must be a better way.

By the way, I’ve been waiting over an hour for my 6.3K contacts on Google to download. They just dribble in a dozen or so at a time.

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