Help with OSX Address Book

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Right - I stupidly added for too many names to my address book, which means that it's taking about a minute to send a message, as each address is queried to check whether it's in the book and thus needs to be added. It's also helpfully got 2 of each person in there.

I've backuped the original and deleted it, but want to manage it; I want to be able to get rid of duplicates, remove those without email addys and so on, but the search facility is rudimentary. Is there an app out there where I can manage it and prune the hell out of it in a way which doesn't involve selecting several thousand names and manually deleting them?

Alternatively, can things be speeded up by allocating more memory to Mail.app?

― Dave B (daveb), Friday, 10 October 2003 09:28 (twenty-one years ago)

I had a look at the address book file hoping it would be, like many other things in OSX, in XML, however its not it's in gobbledegook. I'm not really sure what to do about this one other than having no other apps open and going through and weeding out the entries.

Memory is managed on the fly so if you're hitting memory limits then the whole computer needs more memory. How much memory does your machine have? 512Mb is a practical minimum for OS X whatever Apple might say.

― Ed (dali), Friday, 10 October 2003 10:12 (twenty-one years ago)

Oh and try doing the editing in the address book app rather than in Mail.app.

― Ed (dali), Friday, 10 October 2003 10:13 (twenty-one years ago)

Though its possible that your address book file is so large it won't fit into your working memory set, its unlikely that this is causing the huge delay. You'd have to have positively gigantic address book and very little memory before the storage problem becomes worse than the processor time needed to search through it.

I'm not aware of any easy way of automating removing duplicate entries, but you could probably find an Applescript that would do it for you. If not, simply deleting all those duplicate entries by hand will speed things up more than anything. Use Address_Book.app to do this.

There is no notion of increasing the amount of memory allocated to applications in OS X. Applications take as much as they need, even if its more than you have.

― Barss (Jaacob), Friday, 10 October 2003 17:33 (twenty-one years ago)

Sorry but I friggin'hate Mail and the Address Book. Blergh!

― nathalie (nathalie), Friday, 10 October 2003 17:41 (twenty-one years ago)

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