[Users] Claws-Mail Address Book problem

[Ken Parkes]

Please excuse this rather long-winded post.

I mail a newsletter to a charity group. I recently re-arranged
recipients into groups of fifty which is the maximum my ISP will now
accept for mailing. At the same time I sorted my personal files more
logically. Before closing I used Backup on my Mint Linux desktop to
backup the .claws-mail directory to an external hard drive.  When I
started up the following day there was a message to the effect that
the address book couldn't be read.  I closed it and rebooted.  No
mention of a problem at reboot but the address book was empty.

In /home/myavatar/.claws-mail/addrbook there are forty files named
in the form addrbook-00000x where x is an integer, some with
suffix .xml.bak and some with .xml. The latter open in Firefox and
the former in a text editor and both contain email addresses in the
form

   -<person uid=""first-name=""last-name=""...etc.../>

with "" containing the relevant information.  The backup on the
external hard drive contains a duplicate set of files.

Can someone show me how to get the files back into my address book
other than by copying individually - it would take me days?.  And what
could have caused the problem?

Thanks for looking,

Ken