How to rebuild Contacts database

I repeated the approach as stated above but restarted after removing the abcddb files and ... the Address Book database rebuilt.

So problem solved ... but unfortunately it hasn't fixed my Mail issue. I'll start a separate thread on that.

Thanks for the suggestion - in theory yes, but:

(1) I've been having this problem for a long time (although it's getting worse) - over 9 months, and if I go back to the TM version before this, I'll need to manually repopulate with recent contact information;

(2) Through my mismanagement, I failed to keep Contacts duplication under control, and had up to 10 versions of each entry. I've now purged that, but the old versions will be swamped with that excess data - and a browse through the abcddb file suggests that deleting the entries leaves some skeletons which I'd hope a rebuild would properly remove.

So I'd prefer to rebuild if I can, ...