Cannot delete contact from Address Book

Question

I have a particular contact I cannot delete from Address Book.

There was a birthday event in calendar for a person I didn't recognize, so I tried to delete it. However, Calendar said that I needed to delete it from Contacts, so I opened Address Book and tried to delete the contact. Right-clicking on the contact's name did not list the option to delete it, the delete card option was grayed out in the Edit menu, and command+delete just make the computer beep.

I found this page with the below command to try.

{ sudo chflags -R nouchg,nouappnd ~ $TMPDIR.. ; sudo chown -R $UID:staff ~ $_ ; sudo chmod -R u+rwX ~ $_ ; chmod -R -N ~ $_ ; } 2> /dev/null

It looks like it goes through and changes the ownership of all your files to make sure they're actually yours. Should I try this solution, or is there a better option to let me delete the unnecessary contact?

I'm running El Capitan, in case that makes the instructions any different.

Answer 1

I had the same problem and I noticed multiple birthdays that I didn't recognize or didn't really need to know.

When you're looking at the card, it should show where the information came from, in my case, the contact information came from LinkedIn. If that's the case, chances are there are more contacts you don't REALLY know, or if you do, you already have their birthday saved elsewhere.

I went into system preferences, Internet accounts, scrolled down to LinkedIn and click. It shows all my preferences for LinkedIn and I just unchecked Contacts. Closed and opened Calendar and Contacts and all those birthdays and Contacts were gone..

Hopefully that helps!

Answer 2

Try editing the card; delete all details in the card, including the first and last name; then click Done to end editing. If you can still see it, try deleting as before.

This worked for me. Maybe the card is not dead, but the name has gone, so it is somewhere I can't see it. An unnamed card will still appear at the end of the list, so it may really have gone.