Importing Address books in Mozilla Thunderbird

JohnB47

Just been helping a neighbour by exporting all his address book info from his old PC, via a USB stick, to his new PC.

I first noticed that the address books had names like Personal Addresses, Contacts and Collected Addresses (or something like that). So I created separate folders with those names on the USB stick and exported the relevant addresses into each one. Then I Imported them to the new PC and used the same names.

The problem is that we now have two sets of each address book. We were able to determine which were the old ones (neighbour had begun to create entries in the new PC before I said we could import from the old PC) and I was able to delete the entries in those. But now it won't let me delete the actual address book - so that there's only one of each showing. 

Curiously, it does seem to be offering me the option to delete the new version of each one.

How can I get rid of the duplicate, 'old' address books? These 'old' ones are the ones that came with the new PC.

Or maybe - just thought of this - copy all entries in each new address book and paste them into the old address book, then delete the new address book?

Thanks for any help.

debitcardmayhem

You would be better "importing" i.e. copying his full profile from his old PC , assuming it's windows then it's C:\Users\Hisname\AppData\Roaming\thunderbird\Profiles put that in the new pc in the similar place .Then follow this https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-thunderbird-profiles#w_starting-the-profile-manager

I can't get at a Windows mc at the moment to give you full details

EDIT: just remembered there is this too import-export-tools-ng a TB add-on

JohnB47

Thanks for that. The PC does seem to be working OK at present. I'm just worried that having duplicate address books will give the system a problem at some point. I can't understand why it even allowed me to create address books with the same names as existing ones. I thought the Import function would simply remove the old ones and inset the new.