Import Your Contacts into GMail

41 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…

• Gary C // Sep 15, 2008 at 3:47 pm

  I used Neil Ehrenberg’s suggestion (dropping that final dangling comma after Notes) and it worked well. You may get some errors and you should look at them RIGHT AWAY, as it seems that once you move on you can never see which ones got “ignored” etc.

  Thanks to all who have participated in this thread. VERY HELPFUL!

• John // Sep 27, 2008 at 11:36 pm

  emorris, thank you on your note about having to use ‘E-mail Address’ and ‘Alt E-mail Address’ as the column headers.

• Joe // Sep 30, 2008 at 4:44 pm

  I tried david’s and then obfusco’s approach, stupidly trying to load them in without testing the approach. Now I have 2 times 2800 unsearchable emails described as (unnamed contact). When you click on one, you can see all the detail, but gmail can’t. When I tried to delete them All, I was told you can only delete 500 at a time, and I don’t see a button for 500. This is a prescription for carpel tunnel of the finger.

• David Bradley // Sep 30, 2008 at 4:56 pm

  Ouch! Sorry Joe. I’ve amended the original post to warn users to test on a small data set first.

• Twila // Oct 2, 2008 at 11:33 pm

  Regarding selecting only 500 addresses at a time to delete (see Joe’s post):

  Select one address, hold down the shift key and click an address further down (can be several pages down). Continue to hold down the shift button until the computer catches up to you. You can unselect this way also if you go too far: continually keeping the shift button down, back track until you have what you want selected. Let up on the shift key and press the “delete” key.

  Hope this makes sense.

• Doretta Harter // Oct 4, 2008 at 2:17 am

  I’m new to g-mail. I read with interest on how to export Thunderbird Personal Address Book. I have worked weeks on this, literally to the point it is making me ill. Can anyone help this 75 year old lady?

• Trent // Oct 10, 2008 at 10:14 am

  Easy way:

  1. Export LDIP from Thunderbird
  2. Import into Outlook Express
  3. Export from outlook as a csv
  4. Import into Gmail

  I had to do all this, so I could finally import contacts into Twitter

  5. Import into twitter via Gmail

  What a mess really.

• David Bradley // Oct 10, 2008 at 11:56 am

  If only there were a universal tool that could pull together all contacts and emails, sort them, remove the duplicates, make sure each name had a tag, email and their web addres…

  Dream on.

• wrybread // Nov 13, 2008 at 1:59 am

  I too had a problem importing email from Thunderbird to Gmail. Gmail would dump everything into the “notes” field, and name the contact “unnamed contact”. Nice.

  I tried the solutions here and they didn’t work for me. What did work was opening the .csv file that was exported from Thunderbird and changing the first line to this:

  First Name,Last Name,Name,Nickname2,E-Mail,alt email address, work phone,home phone,fax,pager,mobile,address1,address2,city,stat

  That’s similar to a suggestion here, but note that email is called “E-Mail”, and the display name is Name. You can probably call what I’m calling Nickname2 simply Nickname, I did that for testing but it worked so I didn’t change it back.

  It still dumps all snail mail addresses into the Notes field, but at least it puts the email addy into the email field, which means the address book is usable for sending emails.

  I’m amazed this was so hard.

  By the way you can see what field names gmail expects by exporting your gmail address book and having a look at the headers.

• Danny // Nov 28, 2008 at 10:54 am

  None of the above solutions fully worked for me (although I didn’t try the outlook approach). When importing a csv file from thunderbird Gmail would put the email address in the notes section.

  I tried exporting a couple of email addresses from gmail to see what format it would like. It was a csv format with Name, E-mail and Notes fields. I took my exported csv file from Thunderbird and changed the columns to match what gmail exported. This new file imported successfully and put the email address in the correct location. Note, after importing I composed an email, but the auto-suggest of email addresses did not initially work. After I moved a suggested email address into my contacts then the auto-suggest started working for all my contacts.

• richard // Dec 15, 2008 at 9:50 pm

  hi everyone, i just managed to get the invisible contacts to appear in my gmail import, by copying the nickname column (or whatever you want) into the Z column of my csv file, which was labelled Company /Société in french. it all works !

• Marty Fried // Dec 25, 2008 at 7:11 am

  I had lots of problems using both linux and windows versions to import. Haven’t tried the Outlook Express method – that’s too much trouble.

  One method that worked well for me was to import the CSV into Excel, delete all the unused columns (and edit the rows while I’m at it), then save the result as CSV, and import. It worked perfectly for the columns I was using (not that many). The nickname seems to be ignored in all cases. The email address field used the standard heading without the hyphen. The notes field came in as notes, of course. The nice thing about this method is the ease of editing using Excel.

• plymdesign // Jan 6, 2009 at 6:30 pm

  Marty Fried’s method worked for me; others produced a list of uniform “Unnamed Contact” entries.

  In my header information, I used “E-Mail,” changed “stat” to “state,” and added “zip” to the zip code column. Make sure you have a header entry for each of your columns of data.

• Bjohnson // May 1, 2009 at 9:01 pm

  It doesn’t actually matter if you call the fields “nickname” or “name” or “email” or “email address”. What solved the problem for me was the fact that the csv file I was using had multiple sheets, and the program doesn’t support that. Remove any other worksheets you might have in your excel file, export into a csv again, then try. Worked for me, after having tried to change the column names over and over.

• Raf // May 5, 2009 at 4:08 pm

  As of today, this worked great from T-bird to Gmail (I generated by exporting out a few contacts from Gmail to Outlook, comparing the headers and swapping out about 15 of them):

  First Name,Last Name,Name,E-mail Address,E-mail 2 Address,Business Phone,Home Phone,Business Fax,Pager,Mobile Phone,Home Street,Home Street 2,Home City,Home State,Home Postal Code,Home Country,Business Street,Business Street 2,Business City,Business State,Business Postal Code,Business Country,Job Title,Department,Company,Web Page 1,Web Page 2,Birth Year,Birth Month,Birth Day,Custom 1,Custom 2,Custom 3,Custom 4,Notes

• David Bradley // May 5, 2009 at 5:26 pm

  Good stuff!

• russ // Jul 5, 2009 at 9:45 pm

  i’ve been trying to do this on and off for over a year, and it still doesnt work. i’ve got it pretty close now but i cannot get all the fields to stay the same – name is fine, email is fine, a few phone numbers are ok but the address is still messed up.

  i’ve tried the add-ons for thunderbird – they dont work properly either.

  i should have just typed them all in it would have been way quicker and much less frustrating.

• t // Aug 13, 2009 at 9:39 am

  Finally worked for me only after changing the header to e-mail address

• SD // Oct 11, 2009 at 9:44 am

  Here is how to get it to work –

  1. In thunderbird. Open address book. If you don’t want to import ALL of your thunderbird contacts to gmail, create a new contact list. Select and drag contacts that you will eventually want to import to this new list. When you are done, or you simply want to import all contacts to gmail, export the newly created list or whole address book as a comma separated vales file.

  2. Open the CSV file in Excel. You have to delete redundant information and rename a header for gmail to import the list correctly. First rename “Primary Email” to “Email Address”. Then delete other redundant information.The only columns you need are: “First Name” / “Last Name” and “Email Address”. Just these three.

  Once you only have three columns, then save the file.

  Import into gmail.

  Note: this obviously doesn’t import any other info besides email addresses. But you can figure this out. Just match the headers with what gmail is looking for.

• anthony // Dec 14, 2009 at 12:08 am

  I don’t know about any of you but exporting if possible as vcard worked for me =)

• Kevin // Jan 19, 2010 at 6:25 pm

  I just spent the better part of 30 minutes trying to get this to work. I used Neil’s advice above and got 80% there. Close enough. I don’t use Microsoft Outlook, so I couldn’t export vCards as some suggest. Google should be ashamed of how hard this is relative to some of the obscure functionality they have elsewhere. Especially since the Droid users will need to move their contacts over to gmail.

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