Address Book: cannot delete contacts or stop syncing

Question

Address Book: cannot delete contacts or stop syncing

I no longer use the Mac address book app., but I don't want to jettison it altogether in case I decide at some future date to use it again. It is full of contacts, and includes several groups that I created at the time when I did use it. All sorts of mysterious things keep happening: when I send e-mails out from my usual e-mail client (SeaMonkey, not the Mac Mail) to a group created in that e-mail client, the messages get sent to people I have deleted from the group — apparently because the contact is still there in the Address Book.

I have tried to delete all contacts and all groups from Address Book, but after a moment or two they all re-appear. How can I permanently delete them, and how can I prevent Address Book from syncing with other applications?

Thank you for any help.

eMac G4 (PPC), 1.25 GHz, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Jan 2, 2011 1:28 PM

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Answer 1

BDAqua

Level 10

239,213 points

Jan 2, 2011 3:03 PM in response to Michael Graubart

apparently because the contact is still there in the Address Book.

Yes, SeaMonkey uses AB.

In AB, Select All, then Export a vCard for the whole bunch, then backup or move these out of AB's & SM's reach...

For Address Book, quit AB...

Files...

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.plist

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.abd.plist

Folders...

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Caches/com.apple.AddressBook/

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Answer 2

Jan 3, 2011 2:24 AM in response to BDAqua

Thanks, BDAqua. I have not done the vCard bit because I do not want to keep the information from AB (I have all the contacts I want to retain in my SeaMonkey and my Palm address books), but have deleted the files. I assume that if I were to want to use AB again in the future, these would be reconstituted.

If I remove the folders you mentioned, would they be reconstituted if I opened AB again? Or should I keep them in a safe place?

Thinking about it, it seems that if I were ever accidentally to open AB again, all the contacts from my other address books would at once be synced back into AB. It looks to me as if the only safe thing to do is to leave the two folders where they are, but remove the AB application from my hard disk and keep it on a CD for possible re-introduction at a later date.

All this suggests that in AB's Preferences it should be possible to choose whether AB should or should not automatically sync with other address books. Is that a suggestion worth passing on to the software developers?

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Answer 3

BDAqua

Level 10

239,213 points

Jan 3, 2011 9:55 AM in response to Michael Graubart

I have not done the vCard bit because I do not want to keep the information from AB

That is just to have a safety Backup incase you need to restore it.

If I remove the folders you mentioned, would they be reconstituted if I opened AB again? Or should I keep them in a safe place?

No, to enable use in AB again you'd move the folders back to the original locations.

It looks to me as if the only safe thing to do is to leave the two folders where they are, but remove the AB application from my hard disk and keep it on a CD for possible re-introduction at a later date.

I doubt AB is doing this to SeaMonkey, it appears to me that SeaMonkey is looking in those AB folders itself for the info.

Is that a suggestion worth passing on to the software developers?

Honestly, I think that'd be the opposite of what 99.999% of people would expect/want, but...

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

PS. And there's no likelihood it would be changed in Tiger/10.4.x, as Apple is working on 10.7.x now.

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Answer 4

Jan 3, 2011 10:06 AM in response to BDAqua

Thanks v. much for clarification. My worry has really been that AB keeps automatically filling up with contacts; if I could stop that happening, then I could just delete everything from AB, and there wouldn't be anything for SeaMonkey to grab hold of. But there is no way in SeaMonkey preferences to stop AB collecting contacts from it. Anyway, I have solved the problem by force majeure: I have removed AB.app to a CD away from my computer.

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Answer 5

BDAqua

Level 10

239,213 points

Jan 3, 2011 11:04 AM in response to Michael Graubart

I have removed AB.app to a CD away from my computer.

Hmmm, you mean AB without running was adding things?

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Answer 6

Jan 3, 2011 12:54 PM in response to BDAqua

No, not quite. If I started AB, there were a few hundred contacts in it. If I then deleted all of them but left AB running (but did not start any other application or do anything at all), they spontaneously re-appeared in AB after a short while. Similarly, if I deleted them from AB, closed AB and then re-opened AB,they were all back in AB. (At least that is how I remember it.)

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