Sometime over the past few years, my Outlook registry got messed up and nothing can find its address books — including Thunderbird. Since I still keep my canonical contacts in Outlook (I’m trying to give that up, truly) I periodically need to sync it over to TBird and GMail.

 

Gmail’s easy — just do a CSV export from Outlook and it’s happy to import that file. But TBird’s much pickier and doesn’t map the fields well at all. So I found the easiest way to do this is via Outlook Express. Here’s my simple recipe:

  1. Run Outlook (I’m using 2003)
  2. Export Contacts to CSV file
  3. Run Outlook Express
  4. Delete all contacts
  5. Import Other Address Book… (CSV)
  6. Export to WAB file (not sure if this is really needed)
  7. Run TBird
  8. Open Address Book
  9. Delete all contacts
  10. Import from Outlook Express address book

Done!

Related posts:

  1. Export Contacts from Outlook to OutlookExpress
  2. Getting Mailing Labels out of Outlook 2002
  3. Loving Thunderbird
  4. Fickle Outlook (2002, too)
  5. What lurking processes slow your startup