For many years now my smart groups have been broken with respect to the 'is member of' and 'is not member of' operators. Address book would often crash each Christmas when I tried to get them to work again. Typing a group name into the text field often ended up with each character appearing twice. I searched each year but found no solution, then this year I came across this solution on the following web page:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090502055259990
I have produced a refined version of the instructions here, in case the web page ever disappears:
- Obviously I had Address Book closed, but just to be explicit, close it if it's somehow running.
- Make a backup of ~/Library » Application Support » AddressBook » AddressBook-v22.abcddb.
- Now delete the file ~/Library » Application Support » AddressBook » AddressBook-v22.abcddb.
- If you have a problem with one smart group then delete the smart group metadata file in ~/Library » Application Support » AddressBook » Metadata. To find the right file to delete, so you don't lose all your Smart Groups, sort the files by date and erase the last-edited file that ended in "...ABGroup.abcdg". If you had a systematic problem like me, just delete all the Smart Groups, they don't take long to make again.
- Relaunch Address Book. It will create the AddressBook-v22 file automatically, using the information in the Metadata directory.
And after that, your Smart Groups should be working again for memberships, with the group name field filled with a drop down instead of an empty text field.
