thunderbird address book export

[drufus2002]

I am running with ubuntu 20.04.4 and a new install of thunderbird.

I have an export of my address book from another computer. I asked it to export my address and it did it with a pdf file. Now I want to import that and there seems to be no way to import a pdf file. I also tried to export some email - failed miserably.

Thoughts?

[mgagnonlv]

Do you still have access to the other computer?

If so, you should export it in a workable format. If the other computer had Thunderbird, the default format selected is (comma separated (system encoding .csv)), but there is also comma separated (UTF-8; csv); tab separated and vcard. The default format is the one that works the best for such transfers. If the other computer is using Outlook or some other email, you could export in CSV or some other tabular format it offers. If you have more than one choice, do many exports and try to see which one works the best.

Unfortunately, there might be incompatibilities in formatting between what your previous email exports and what Thunderbird wants, especially if you use a language other than US English. LibreOffice is a great free program that allows you to import CSV files and transform their encoding to and from UTF-8 (for accented letters and apostrophes), field separation, and field naming (i.e. what you have in the first line of the file).

Finally, if you transfer from another program (or even from Gmail Contacts), some fields have a slightly different name. So try to import, and if some of the fields don't have what you would expect them to have, open your CSV file (again) with LibreOffice and change the headers accordingly.

[tanstaafl]

How did you export the address book? I'm not aware of any built-in functionality in Thunderbird to export anything as a .pdf file. Even Version 101.b2 (a beta build) doesn't have that capability.

https://www.zamzar.com/convert/pdf-to-csv/ is a web site that claims to be able to convert a pdf file to a .csv file. However, I agree with Michel Gagnon that the easiest solution would be to export the contacts again using the .csv format if you can.

[drufus2002]

Thank you for the reply.

Sometimes I think that the folks making the changes are working, very hard, to confuse. I went into thunderbird, clicked on export, and was presented with a pdf file with all of my addresses so I figured that was the ballgame and saved the pdf file. As far as I can tell there were no other options. If there are other options I couldn't find them. If anybody knows how that one works I would appreciate at least a hint.

Thank you.......

[mgagnonlv]

Here is the way to export the address book(s).

– Press ALT to show full menus

– Select Tools –> Address book.
The address book will be displayed.

– While in the window of the address book, Select Tools –> Export.

– You will be given options to export the address book(s) in a CSV file using the default system encoding (default) or in UTF-8. Other options are also available, but for a new import into Thunderbird, it's better to use either the default (if you remain on the same platform like from Ubuntu to Ubuntu) or UTF-8.

– Depending on the accounts you had and the structure you had, you may have one than one prompt, depending on the number of address books you had. In my case, I have successively prompts for Collected addresses, Contacts from my_employer, Personal address book (i.e. the default one).

– Save each one of them in a separate file and decide what to do with each one of them afterwards.