Finally - a tool for exporting Address Book to Thunderbird (and Gmail)

Answering the prayers of potential Thunderbird switchers everywhere, a wonderful and as-yet unnamed individual has put together a web-based vCard-to-CSV Converter for easily moving your contacts from Address Book into either Thunderbird or Gmail. The interface and process are both conveniently simple: export your desired group in Address Book (File > Export vCard) and feed it into this tool. You have three conversion options: LDIF (which is Thunderbird-friendly), CSV and Gmail CSV.

After discovering the joys of Gmail (but not removing Mail.app from my Dock just yet) I'm not that interested in Thunderbird, but I fired it up just to verify that this conversion and import process is the first I've seen to truly work without a single hangup. The new LDIF file imports just fine into Thunderbird, and you won't even have to remap any fields.

[via Hawk Wings]

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Source: http://labs.brotherli.ch/vcfconvert/

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Answering the prayers of potential Thunderbird switchers everywhere, a wonderful and as-yet unnamed individual has put together a web-based...

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ChrisJ

Nice idea, but it has problems with non-western characters, no matter if vcard file is exported with Address Book's UTF-16 or UTF-8 setting.

January 09 2006 at 6:12 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jimmy

I'm with MP; sync between Gmail and AddressBook would be great. But if you're like me, how about doing it across several apps? Gmail, AddressBook, Entourage, etc...

January 05 2006 at 12:40 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Tim Bush

I have to agree with a another poster, I have a an apple script that is named address book to CSV dated September 9, 2004. I would be VERY wary of my addresses being beamed all over the web.

January 05 2006 at 11:31 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jeff (Switcher since 10/2004)

I would be really, really, really concerned that my addresses would be copied by this web-based tool.

January 05 2006 at 10:54 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

D Jones

Finally? September 1st 2004, and repeated on the 7th at macosxhints.com:

http://www.hailstonesoftware.com/articles/2004/09/01/address-book-to-csv

And, btw, it's an applescript that you run locally. Not some unknown software which transmits your address book data unsecurely across the intramanet.

January 05 2006 at 9:30 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Wow - worked for me. This is great.

Now, it would be awesome if there was someway for Thunderbird to use Address Book all the time (so addresses would always be in sync).

January 05 2006 at 9:23 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Dan Waldhoff

Sounds great ... but it brought up a dialog asking me if I wanted to continue after opening opening Excel. Didn't think, in this instance, that I wanted to.

January 05 2006 at 8:23 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply