Deleting extraneous auto-suggested addresses from Thunderbird

(1) I think Thunderbird stores the auto-completion list in a section of the Address Book called Collected Addresses. To remove an entry you have to:

1. Click the large Address Book button in the main (Mail Filter) toolbar
2. Select the Collected Addresses group
3. Locate and delete the desired addresses from there

(2) Ubuntu uses the Firefox web browser by default. The location of the Internet cache files are located in within the "Firefox" directory on your hard drive.

Open Firefox in about:cache page and you'll see the path not only to your Disk cache device but also to your Offline cache device. All you have to do is to navigate to your Disk cache device path which is a folder named "Cache" inside the directory with the ".default" extension (in my case is /home/slickymaster/.cache/mozilla/firefox/xgoa8kkf.default/Cache) and delete all its contents.

David,

Thank you very much for your advice. I am using Thunderbird version 24.0 and Firefox version 11.0. I can't locate Collected Addresses within Thunderbird. However, I have been able to delete all past history from Firefox from the History menu in its toolbar. Yet old e-mail addresses still keep appearing when I start addressing in a new message.

Julianloui

(1) Navigate to Tools -> Address Book, or alternatively press Ctrl+Shift+B and you'll open Address Book dialog. On the left column you'll have two icons, one for your 'Personal Address Book' and another below for the 'Collected Addresses'.

(2) reading your question I assume that you were referring to clean temporary cookies created by your web browsing from my computer's cache and not to clean your Firefox web history.

Dave,

(1) I've been seeing only one address book in Thunderbird for a couple of weeks. I remember seeing the other one named Accumulated Addresses (aka collected addresses) sometime ago on this machine. I still see two address books on my two other Ubuntu 12.04 computers. For some reason, the missing address book is definitely there but I haven't been able to uncover it.

(2) Yes, your interpretation is correct. I deleted the Firefox history just to try to see if it would make any difference. It didn't.

I posted my problem in importing an address file to Thunderbird recently. The importing went problem-free and yet it ended with an empty new address book. Perhaps this refelects a Thunderbird installation problem and I should undertake a new installation. But I am just too lazy to do it again after I re-installd Thunderbird only a few weeks ago due to an Ubuntu 12.04 crash.

Thanks very much again.

Julianlou

David,

Thanks very much for leading me to the right place.

 I found a bunch of .mab files in the ~/.thunderbird/2qx3mdo7.default directory. I renamed my current book oldabook.mb and Thunderbird opened a new one named abok.mab. After deleted history.mab, the old unwanted addresses are now gone for good.
I noticed that TB immediately replaced the old history.mab file with a new one.

Julianloui

Thanks David Pires, that solved my question.