By Jin Nan Goto
In a previous post I went over exporting email contacts from a webmail account and importing them into Mozilla Thunderbird. However, what if you want to add extra contacts directly into the .csv (comma separated value) file that you exported? What if you have a list of contacts on an Microsoft Excel file that you would like to import into Thunderbird. Any spreadsheet program, such as outlook (but also openoffice.org and even Google Docs)will be able to read, edit, and save .csv files. I can easily open the contacts.csv file that I exported from Hotmail and edit it in Excel.
Then I can type in the new contacts. One limitation of Thunderbird is that they only import the first 36 or so fields of the csv and the Hotmail .csv file has a lot of unnecessary field. You need to make sure that you eliminate all but 36 of the fields.
If you have an Excel file (.xls) containing contacts that you would like to add to your Thunderbird Address book, No problem. Open the spreadsheet and click on “save as”. Then select CSV (Comma Delimited) as the document type and its ready to import into thunderbird.
Lastly, Whenever you are importing your .csv file make sure that all the fields in Thunderbirds Address Book match up with the fields that you are importing. You may need to move a couple fields up or down to match.
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By Jin Nan Goto
Free webmail services such as Microsoft’s Hotmail, Yahoo mail, and Google Gmail are inexpensive, easy to use, and accessible anywhere that you have a browser. Over time you may collect many email addresses and contacts that you would like to share with other email addresses. This tip is for exporting contacts from Hotmail and importing them into the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. However, the process is similar for most other mail services.
Step 1: Export your contacts from Hotmail
- login to your Hotmail (or Windows Live Mail as it is now called)
- Click on the “Contacts” button on the left of the screen
- Click on the options button on the top right corner of the next screen to pull up the options for contacts
- Select Export Contacts
- Click the Export Contacts button and it will save you contacts as a .csv (Comma Separated Values) file
The Comma Separated Values file that you export can be read by Microsoft Excel. You can use this same process to move all your contacts over to an excel spreadsheet. If you are using a different webmail then hotmail, you may export your contacts as a Tab delimited file (.tab) and this file type functions in pretty much the same way as a .csv
Step 2: Import contacts into Thunderbird
- From the Thunderbird tools, click on Import.
- Select “Address Book” as the type of material to import.
- Choose “Text file (LDIF, .tab, .csv, .txt)” as the format and click on Next
- From There you can browse for the contacts file which you previously exported.
