Home Forums Mac Software Mac Applications Upgrading to v10.6: Address Book—and Mail—Problem

Caution: If your Address Book under v10.5.x includes a Smart Group with a negative condition (e.g., "Card is not a member of any group"), you may have a problem upgrading to Snow Leopard's (v10.6) Address Book. I did.

After the update--which finished in about 45 minutes and ran without any obvious complaint--my Address Book would launch, display there were no cards, and then freeze--necessitating a Force Quit. When I launched Mail, initially it would open looking normal, but then it, too, would freeze. (Once the problem with Address Book was solved, Mail was then OK.) The good news was that, so far, that has been my only glitch with the upgrade.

It took a call to AppleCare--and a long time trying other "solutions"--before the technician found a posting (I believe from some forum, but I don't know whether it was an internal or public forum) noting a problem if there were such a Smart Group in the Leopard Address Book. Having done a SuperDuper! clone, on an external hard drive, of my MacBook Pro immediately before doing the upgrade was part of my game plan and, in this case, was a life-saver.

With the AppleCare technician pointing the way, I re-booted into Leopard from that external hard drive, launched Address Book, and deleted the Smart Group. We then copied the ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook folder from the external hard drive (after adjusting Permissions, if needed) to the comparable location on my MacBook Pro once it was re-booted from its internal hard drive in Snow Leopard--but we weren't out of the woods quite yet. Address Book would now launch, but it still claimed no cards. (There were, however, the proper 5,000+ cards in the Metadata folder within that AddressBook folder.)

While having deleted the Smart Group within Address Book application under Leopard before copying that AddressBook folder was expected to have deleted all remnants of it, the technician wondered whether that was, indeed, the case. He then had me search that Metadata folder within that AddressBook folder for the Smart Group file by typing "smart" in the search oval as that file's long cryptic name would include "smart"--and such a file was found. (In my case, it ended with "ABSmartGroup.abcdg" [without the quotes].) We deleted that file, re-started the computer, and Address Book was fine. And as noted above, when I then tried Mail, it, too, was fine.

Along the way of trying other things that didn't work (e.g., transferring an Address Book Archive made under Leopard and importing it under Snow Leopard; doing Export Group vCards under Leopard and importing them under Snow Leopard), we found importing Group vCards under Snow Leopard doesn't preserve the Group identification and while, then, hoping to use Snow Leopard's Address Book's "Last Import" Group to identify the last import, we found that Group doesn't properly report just the last import. (The AppleCare technician is reporting those issues within Apple.)

Note: I then, after doing an File->Export->Address Book Archive, tried to recreate that "negative" Smart Group in Address Book under Snow Leopard and that, too, caused a freeze; however, I was able to recover using that Archive.

Hope this helps someone else avoid the problem as, otherwise, I very much like what Snow Leopard--even v10.6--has brought me. (Now if some of my 3rd-party software gets updated for Snow Leopard, things will be even sweeter.)

David

David,

Thanks for taking the time to post this helpful counsel. No doubt it will prove most helpful to those who have suffered your experience.

And nicely written too (IMNHO). Bravo!

You mentioned in your post "we found importing Group vCards under Snow Leopard doesn't preserve the Group identification".

I posted the following in the Apple Support Discussion Group in relation to my own experience with this problem:

I found a solution to importing groups from Outlook .vcf files. I think this undocumented and I found it by accident. I create a group from the .vcf file name, for instance "clients.vcf" the group name I made was "clients". If I choose this group and go to the menu item File:Import and choose the file "clients.vcf" it does not import into the group.

Out of frustration I was importing the file "clients.vcf", then opening the "clients.vcf" file in TextEdit so I could see the group member names. I would then find each persons name in Address Book and manually drag the name to the Group "clients". This works but would take a whole day for 50+ groups and 1000s of addresses.

To save myself a step, instead of choosing the file from the File:Import menu item, I opened a finder window and double clicked on the file "clients.vcf" while I had the group chosen in Address Book. To my great surprise the file was imported into the group "clients". I have done this consistently with about 20 groups. It is not dependent on the Last Import group being correctly initialized before import.

Why you get different results by choosing the import file in different ways I do not know but you do. I think Apple should make this consistent and allow you alway to import to a group that is chosen. At least they should document this method and point it out to Switchers from Windows.

This doesn't correct the problem with the Last Import group not being initialized before each import but does circumvent it for my purpose.