The only place address suggestions come from is your address books. You have two address books by default. The Personal and the Collected books. Find the old address and edit or delete it.

I am having the exact problem. I went through every address book i have and eliminated all instances of my contacts old email address. However, every time I send a message to the group the address use to appear in Thunderbird includes the deleted address. Is there another invisible place Thunderbird stores addresses? In older versions of Thunderbird I never experienced this problem. Hope there is a Thunderbird guru out there that has an answer.

To "Airmail", like "furban61," I searched both Collected and Personal (and all the other Groups/Folders I created and the old address that keeps popping up is not there!!

I, too, hope there's some T-bird maven who knows what evil lurks where . . . .

Create a new email message. Address it to any of these unwanted addresses. Save it as a Draft. View it in the Drafts folder, where the addressees will be shown with stars alongside.

Click a star, select Edit and you'll be given choices to edit or delete the entry.

Chances are there is an address book you didn't know you had, or these are secondary or additional email addresses. But this procedure will take you to those stored addresses where you can deal with them.

There's no point searching "groups" or "folders" (whatever they are) since Mailing Lists, which some people insist on calling folders or groups, are simply sub-sets of their parent address books. You can't have an entry in a List without a corresponding entry in the containing address book.

BTW, if you attempt to change a Contact card in an address book and the change doesn't "take" then it's likely there is corruption in the address book data file. If this seems to be your issue, say so and we'll go over the export and import process to heal your data.

I can assure you that they are in one of your address books. It may be one that you saved that is missing some info to make it show up. Using the trick Zenos describes will make it appear so you can delete it. The only thing I would add so this method works easily is to turn on the message pane in the Draft folder. You do this by pressing F8. Now the address will be displayed in the message pane header. You will notice the mystery address is followed by a gold star indicating that it is in one of your address books.

Glad a Thunderbird expert came along to save the day.

This technique failed. The Draft msg addresses has no star. Not only do the two "phantom" contact addresses for this guy continue to show up as auto-fill choices, the new address that I've been trying to create and thought I'd saved numerous times doesn't appear.

And so for the umpteenth time I've gone through all my 'top level' address book folder and deleted their several appearances. Then I close T-bird, re-open it and guess what? All of them--every one that I just deleted--magically re-appeared!

So Zenos, please help me to fix what is apparently a corrupted Address Book file. Thanks in advance....

If you look at the draft message and are looking in the address field you are correct, there is no star. If you follow the instructions and turn on the message pane and look at the address in the header of the message pane there is always a star. It is not filled with color if it is not in one of your address books and if the contact is in an address book then it is filled with color.

Sorry for being imprecise. Yes, I see a "star" in the "sort by star" column, and I meant to say that it has no color. I've attached a screen shot to make sure I'm understanding what "star" we're talking about....and as you see the star is colorless. So if I'm correct, then Zenos will tell me how to fix my corrupt Address Book file. If not, please tell me what star I should be looking for.

These stars here....

Okay, as you see attached, both of the recurring addresses have stars behind them (honestly, I never noticed these stars before); and so now what can I do? As I said, I keep deleting their occurrences from the three top level Books (Personal Address Book, Professional and Collected Addresses) and they keep re-appearing in all three after I exit and re-open T-bird. See attached for a screengrab of the Collected Addresses.

Click the star and an edit dialog box will open. Use the delete button or correct the errors. Since the stars are filled with color they are in one of your address books somewhere. Where does not matter now. You have them in front of you and can delete or fix them.

Sorry, no dice. I created a draft email with the "Marden" addresses Ive been trying to delete, clicked on the star and the edit dialog box opened, and I deleted the contact--four occurrences, in fact--it is, as it always has been--four times because it was in four places. Ok, so I delete the draft email, double check in all the four places where the address had been occurring and it was gone. (Just like the six or eight times before!). So I close T-Bird, and when I re-open it, all the addresses I deleted (all four) are back exactly where they were!

Any other suggestions?

So it looks like you edit an address book, but the next time you run Thunderbird the changes are undone?

To check this, I suggest you specifically create a dummy Contact in the suspect address book, close Thunderbird, re-open it and see if your new Contact is still there.

If not, we have demonstrated that the selected address book won't save changes.

Select the address book in question, go to Tools|Options and export it, using the LDIF option.

If the affected address book was Personal Address Book, locate your profile (look under Help|Troubleshooting Information), close Thunderbird, and delete abook.mab.

Similarly if it was Collected Addresses, delete history.mab.

In either of these cases, you won't be allowed to delete the broken address book itself, hence the actions above to delete its data file. Other address books, i.e. user-defined, can be deleted.

If you have deleted either of the two address books mentioned above, and their associated data files, the address book will be re-created automatically by Thunderbird when you next run it. You'll have to import and create a new address book, but you can then move its contents. For this reason, avoid giving the imported address book the same name as an existing address book.

Now you can import the data (Tools|Import) from the LDIF file, and after doing so, if necessary, move (drag) the imported Contacts into the preferred location.

Thanks so much. Using your procedure as a template, I did the following, first with my seven Address Books that I had created over the years, and then with my Personal Address Book and Collected Addresses:

1. I deleted all the 'sub-groups' within all 9 of my Address Books. 2. One at a time and for each of my 7 created Books, I made a New Address Book with a slightly different name. 3. I then selected and dragged the contents of the old 7 Books into my newly created ones. 4. I then Exported the contents of each into an LDIF file onto my Desktop, naming the file with my newly-created Book file. 5. I then deleted each of the 7 old, and now empty, Book files. 6. After doing the first, and then after doing the next 3 of these in this way, I double checked the contents of the LDIF files on my Desktop (in Notepad) and closed T-Bird and re-opened to make sure my new Book files "took." They did, and so full of confidence I did the rest without stopping. 7. Then I took time to "clean up" the old Personal Address Book and Collected Addresses before I created new, slightly different Address Books for each. 8. I selected and dragged the contacts from each into the two new Books and exported them as I did the first seven. 9. I closed T-Bird and deleted the "adbook.mab" and "history.mab" files (noticing that T-Bird named my newly-created Address Books adbook-1.mab; adbook-2.mab . . . adbook-7.mab). 10. Re-opening T-Bird, I moved the contacts from the these two Books over into the now-empty Personal and Collected Books and exported their contents onto my Desktop (for safety backup purposes, as I did the other seven). 11. I deleted my two temporary, and now empty, Personal and Collected Books. 12. I tested these and a couple of my new and refreshed Address Books, and found them all bug free! I can now add, delete to my heart's content and I'm now doing my Happy Dance. (Sorry, no YouTube available of this 67-year old white man.)

Thanks, Zenos (and everyone) for helping out. I kinda sense that had my profile indicated that my computer experience goes back to my Osborne 1 transportable computer in 1981 (with the CP/M operating system) and online experience shortly thereafter, I might have been given this final fix sooner. Talk about glitchy software--you can't complain much if you remember those days when everyone was a beta-tester, whether they knew it or not. I even got Adam Osborne himself on the phone when I was having trouble finishing my master's thesis under deadline. Loved his Brit accent, but his company and customer support was already on the wane, burdened by competition from Kaypro and IBM, and no doubt problems like I was experiencing . . . Anyone want my Osborne? I still have it, floppies, manuals and the user magazine they used to publish!