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Import Your Contacts into GMail

 

November 23rd, 2007 · by David Bradley

Import contacts into Google Mail

I’ve been using the Thunderbird email client for a couple of years now, prior to that I was using Pegasus Mail, but sometimes I’d prefer to be able to access my email online without having to worry about a program installed on an arbitrary laptop. As such, I thought it was time I exported my Thunderbird contacts and added them to my main Google mail account.

It’s a breeze to export your whole address book from Thunderbird. Simply click the Address Book icon in the toolbar (or hit Ctrl 2 in Windows). Select the address book to export (I have all “collected” addresses added to my Personal Address Book in the program, so there is only one with any entries). Then choose the address book’s Tools menu and click Export. the default format is LDIF, but you can choose from Tab Delimited and Comma Separated. It’s the latter, comma separated (CSV) you want for GMail. Save the file.

Next, login into your GMail account and choose the Contacts link. Once you’re on that screen you will see two links in the blue above your current listing of contacts - Import Export. The choice is obvious - Import.

In the popup dialog box, browse for the CSV file you just created in the Thunderbird (or other email client). Now, click the Import Contacts button. GMail will extract each comma separated entry from the file and add each contact to your GMail contacts list. Now that is done, you can access your email contacts anywhere you can login to your GMail account.

Of course, Google is also rolling out IMAP access to GMail which will allow you to synchronize your email client with your email account too.

20 responses so far ↓

  • David Bradley // Oct 29, 2007 at 4:04 pm

    Actually, I was a little economical with the truth in terms of how slick the process is.

    I had thousands of contacts in Thunderbird and received this message:

    “Import completed, 3000 contacts have been successfully imported. Your contacts file is too large to be imported all at once.”

    So, I ended up having to split the Thunderbird CSV file and carrying out the import in two steps. But, that’s not too time consuming.

  • russ // Dec 16, 2007 at 4:09 pm

    hmmm…didnt work for me, it said no contacts imported because they had no name or email - the csv export from thunderbird is a different format to gmail. darn it, thought it was going to be easy

  • David Bradley // Dec 16, 2007 at 5:13 pm

    Hmmmm indeed. It worked reasonably well for me, aside from the number limitation. But, I see how it could go wrong, like you say where a contact is listed in the Thunderbird address book only as an email not by name. If I find out any more on that I’ll let you know or if any readers have insights please post them here.

  • Mana // Dec 22, 2007 at 8:04 pm

    This also happened to me. I have 7o contacts in my Thunderbird address book, and they all have a name and and email. However, after I save it as a .csv, I try to import them and this message pops up:
    “We were not able to import any of the
    contacts found in the uploaded file.
    69 contacts have been ignored because
    they didn’t have a name or email.”
    Like I said, I have 7o addresses stored in my address book, and they are all located in the same folder - the personal one. But to say 69 contacts have no name or email means that one of my 7o contacts “fits” the requirements (though, technically, all of them do).
    Maybe having only a tiny bit of HD space left might affect this, but I don’t know…
    Please help, and thanks.

  • John // Jan 15, 2008 at 5:10 am

    Didn’t work for me either. After several attempts, I gave up and exported contacts to Outlook Express, and from there sent them to Gmail.

  • David Bradley // Jan 15, 2008 at 7:13 am

    I blame Outlook!

    db

  • obfusco // Jan 16, 2008 at 5:08 am

    Sounds like the problem might be missing csv headers, the first line should have a comma separated list of field titles:

    first name,last name,display name,nickname,email address,alt email address, work phone,home phone,fax,pager,mobile,address1,address2,city,stat e,zip,country,work address1,work address2,work city,work state, work zip,,,,organization,,,,,,,,,,notes

    was suggested at http://broadbandforum.in/procedures/3902-exporting-thunderbird-address-book-gmail/

    See also http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=12119

  • David Bradley // Jan 16, 2008 at 7:55 am

    Obfusco, thanks for the insights and links. Hopefully, anyone having problems will be able to figure out a fix from that information.

    db

  • Anonymous // Jan 29, 2008 at 12:34 am

    David, Obfusco - I’ve had problems also. Apparently when I imported contacts into gmail, some unrecognized fields were mangled. That resulted in some fields containing newlines. When exporting this from Google, the newline is exported inside a quoted field, but Thunderbird (and OpenOffice Calc) still treat it as the start of a new line - not a field with a newline.

  • David Bradley // Jan 29, 2008 at 8:06 am

    Does anyone have a foolproof way to do this? It seems that lots of readers are having problems and the solution I offered does not work universally.

    db

  • Dmitry // Feb 12, 2008 at 7:53 pm

    It worked for me, but just barely. Gmail imported the Thunderbird CSV file, but it recognized the Nickname field as Name, and dumped everything else into Notes - including the e-mail address. So to use this address book I have to copy the e-mail from Notes to its proper field for each of the contacts.

    Perhaps the solution is to edit the Thunderbird CSV and rename the fields so that gmail can recognize them.

  • David Bradley // Feb 12, 2008 at 10:09 pm

    Interesting thought Dmitry. Maybe someone could create an addon for Thunderbird that would hack the database appropriately…

    db

  • avko // Feb 14, 2008 at 5:10 pm

    It worked for me, using obfusco’s method:

    1) export from Thunderbird to ‘comma separated’ file
    2) open file in notepad
    3) replace first line with:
    first name,last name,display name,nickname,email address,alt email address, work phone,home phone,fax,pager,mobile,address1,address2,city,stat e,zip,country,work address1,work address2,work city,work state, work zip,,,,organization,,,,,,,,,,notes
    4)save
    5) import into gmail

    This worked also for contacts without e-mail address

  • David Bradley // Feb 14, 2008 at 5:57 pm

    Many thanks for the walk-through Avko! Maybe others will have equal success using that approach.

    db

  • Darwin // Jun 20, 2008 at 5:17 pm

    I hit the same wrinkle. After reading the suggestions here and trying a few things, I can report that the column names (of interest to me) ‘Display Name’ and ‘Primary Email’ should be renamed ‘Nickname’ and ‘Email’ (case sensitive) when exporting to Gmail. That solved my problem. Thanks for having this discussion.

    Darwins last blog post..Esbjörn Svensson: When Everyone Has Gone

  • David Bradley // Jun 20, 2008 at 5:27 pm

    Many thanks for the extra tip Darwin.

  • emorris // Jul 12, 2008 at 12:15 pm

    @avko + others:
    You need to use ‘E-mail Address’ and ‘Alt E-mail Address’. The dashes in E-mail are important, otherwise GMail will not recognise it as the email address.

    All I did was (on the first line) change ‘Primary Email’ to ‘E-mail Address’ and ‘Secondary Email’ to ‘Alt E-mail Address’. Thanks.

  • Neil Ehrenberg // Jul 29, 2008 at 8:27 am

    I hate to sound like a broken record, but I too had the same type of problem exporting the e-mail addresses from Thunderbird ( Using Vista) as others have mentioned. I followed the above suggestions on changing the words in the first line (block or column titles) from the original .CSV file as recommended. The original .mab file was 469KB. The CSV ended up only 76KB and I thought I lost contacts when only 15 showed up. After editing the first line (I found that each title with the comma separation could stay as Capital and lower cased letters) and then importing the revised CSV file, I ended up with 901 contacts (WOW). It just took a while for G-mail to turn them into the correct looking contact.. Thanks to all who participated in the above discussions.

    Here is how mine looked:

    First Name,Last Name,Display Name,Nickname,E-mail Address,Alt E-mail,Work Phone,Home Phone,Fax,Pager,Mobile,Address1,Address2,City,State,Zip,Country,Work Address1,Work Address2,Work City,Work State,Work Zip,Work Country,Job Title,Department,Organization,Web Page 1,Web Page 2,Birth Year,Birth Month,Birth Day,Custom 1,Custom 2,Custom 3,Custom 4,Notes,

    Neil Ehrenberg, San Jose, CA

  • David Bradley // Aug 4, 2008 at 9:27 am

    gHacks has an alternative approach that might work better for those Scientext.com readers struggling with CSVs etc

  • Rob // Aug 28, 2008 at 12:58 am

    I can confirm that Neil Ehrenberg’s method worked perfectly for me.

    I couldn’t get it to work with any of the other responses though; Gmail just dumped all of the details into “Notes”, which was useless…

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