Will importing Outlook address books ever work again?

[simon6776]

As above, really. I had an issue last year where I accidentally deleted my SM address book, so wanted to re-import them from Outlook, but found it was not possible:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... it=OUTLOOK

Is there any news on fixing the Outook / Eudora import issue, as I noticed last night that it still isn't working.

[DanRaisch]

My guess (and only a guess) would be "No." Why re-import rather than backing up the SM address book files?

[simon6776]

Well, in the issue last year, it wasn't even possible to import a backed up address book without a few tricks, but I think that's been fixed now.

The reason for wanting to import an Outlook address book is that my phone syncs with Outlook, but SM is my email client, so there is a disparity between my Outlook and SM address books. The easiest way around this, up to when the import function stopped working, was to remove my Outlook contacts from SM, and re-import them, so they would be up to date.

[DanRaisch]

When refer to Outlook is that the Office version of Outlook or Outlook.com? How about exporting the contact data to a CSV format file and importing that to SM?

[simon6776]

It's the Office version of Outlook. I did try the CSV method once before, but it never seemed to work, as most of the fields were missing when imported into SM. I was probably doing something wrong, but gave it up as a bad job in the end.

[DanRaisch]

The imported data did not properly populate the address book because the order of the fields in the file from Outlook doesn't match the field order used by SeaMonkey.

Export the data from the SM address book. To do that, click on the name of the address book, then use menu path Window->Address Book->Tools->Export->Address Books->give the output a name and select "save as type" Comma Separated (CSV). Load the exported file into Excel or another spreadsheet program and do the same with the data file from Outlook. If necessary, reorder the columns in the file from which you intend to import so that it matches the order of those in the export from SeaMonkey. If there are columns in the SeaMonkey file that are not available from Outlook, just leave that column blank. Save the data back to CSV format and import that edited file to SeaMonkey.

Be sure to line up the columns to match SeaMonkey. If, for instance (and I don't think this is the case) Outlook stores the last name and first name as just one field, you would have to split up that data so SeaMonkey's First and Last name fields were populated. The combined last name and first name field from Outlook could be lined up to represent SeaMonkey's Display Name field.

[simon6776]

OK, thanks. That's a nice little project to attempt when I get a moment.

[Pauliemon]

This is a long shot but here is something I remember doing a few years back. I used to have a Yahoo email account. I had something similar to what you did, but what I was able to do is import my address book from Outlook express to Yahoo. Than I was able to export it from Yahoo to my download folder with the option of using to the ldif format that Seamonkey/Thunderbird uses. It worked if I recall. Now this was like years ago. Not sure if you have a yahoo address or not. And if the latest Yahoo email allows you to do it...

[simon6776]

Thanks for the suggestion. I did have a Yahoo email account years ago, but all it received was spam, so I stopped using it.

As a stopgap solution, I installed an older version of Thunderbird, where the importing of an Outlook address book still works, so I did that, then transferred the new address book to my SM profile, which seems to have worked. The only trouble was, despite not setting it as the default mail program, TB still made itself the default 'mailto:' program, so I could no longer 'Send To > Mail Recipient' using SM. There may have been another way around this, but the easiest solution seemed to be to uninstall TB until I next need to use it.

[DanRaisch]

Well, it would have been simple to tell Windows to change the default email program -- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Default_mail_client

[simon6776]

I did try that, but it didn't seem to work. Anyway, it's sorted now, but thanks.