Went to write a business letter this morning and discovered that Thunderbird had hosed my address book (again). There was a warning, but I've become so used to having it trash the collected and default address books (which I don't use) that I didn't realise the report was about the "contacts" address book.

This is now the second time the main address book has been corrupted. I can go back to backed-up versions, but address books are slow-but-important-change data. You really don't want to lose someone, or lose adding them to a particular distribution list, so you have to go through the whole address book file making sure that there's no one left behind.

I wrote myself a little script last time that just dumps the "values" from the .mab file backups Thunderbird creates. With that it's fairly straightforward to check the data, but it takes way too long and there's always this nagging feeling that you've likely missed someone and it's going to come back to bite you some day.

Almost enough to have me set up an LDAP server... but that would be even more of a distraction from what I sat down to work on 2-3/4 hours ago. (Which was supposed to be a quick couple of tasks before I headed to the caffe to write).