Two really well written ghost stories.

Xiaxue: Bullet & Dreamhouse

Oh boy have I been frustrated with those words. Gmail is great. Gmail has threaded emails. Gmail imports contacts. Gmail can’t export contacts.

What reason would there be for Gmail to export contacts? No one who starts using Gmail will switch back to the puny hotmail or yahoomail. So why export your contact list? I decided to try out Mozilla Thunbird, an email client program, and it’s awesome! The interface and functionality (including Gmail’s threaded email!) are widely customizable. I strongly suggest you try it out.

But when composing email, it kills my brain cells to try to remember everyone’s email address. I just love how in Gmail, you can type “Some guy” and the email addresses pop up. This works too, in Thunbird, except I don’t have my contacts in there.

After searching around with no solution, I came up with my own. This is what I wasted 2 hours of my life on.

Select all your contacts, copy them, and paste them into a text-editor

Go to your contact list. It should look something like this.

Click All Contacts, as you want to export all of them.

Select them: drag your mouse from the beginning of the first contact to the last contact. Careful not to click on them. Gmail would then take you to the specific contact.

Copy those text, and paste them into a text-editor (notepad would be fine). Right now, each contact should be on a separate line, regardless of some blank spaces.

The Hard Part: Formatting

This is probably the hardest part of all. If you have a few contacts (less than 20) and wouldn’t mind wasting a few minutes selecting and deleting, do the following, and skip to the next bold section:

• Delete all the white spaces before and after each contact. There should be a tab (”n”) in front of the names, and a tab after the email address. Delete all of them. Show no mercy. Then save the file.

If you are like me who has more than 100 contacts and is as lazy as you can get, you might want to do this. This involves some technological terms and software. ‘Regex’ is needed here. Don’t worry about what it means, all you need is a text-editor that supports it. Neither Notepad nor Microsoft Word supports this. Notepad++, a free-source software, does (Dreamweaver works as well). Notepad++ is really useful, and will come handy in the future too.

1. Now with a regex editor, paste what you copied (your contacts) into a new file. Click the Replace button (in Notepad++, it’s Control + H), and enter the following value for the “Find” field:

   Important Note: All textfields used here are only viewable through Internet Explorer. Indeed it’s a shame, but neither Firefox nor Opera interprets a proper “tab” in the textfield as a tab. Please view this page with IE.

   If you accidentally change something in there, refresh the page and copy it again. Notice there is a tab in front of all that crap.

2. Enter this for the Replace field:

   There is a space in front of that. If you don’t see one, put your curser around the dollar sign and use the arrow keys to move left and right to see if there is a space character. If not, put a space in front of it all.

3. Check “Regular Expression”. Click Replace All. Now all the tabs in front of the email addresses should now be spaces.

4. Now we are going to delete all the tabs (we couldn’t do that before, as that would delete the tab between the name and the email address). Enter this for the Find field (it may seem like there is nothing, but select it and you will see a tab):

5. Enter nothing for the Replace field. This is crucial. Delete any character or spaces that’s there.

6. Technically, we could stop here and move on, but since people have last names, the program won’t distinguish the last name from the email address, since some contacts may or may not have last names. Enter this for the Find field:

7. Enter this for the Replace field:

8. Make sure Regular Expression is still checked. Click Replace All

Now save this file as a text document (*.txt) somewhere.

The Final Touch

This last part only applies for Thunderbird. Of course, you can do the similar for Microsoft Outlook and so on. It should generally work for all email clients.

In Thunderbird, click the Addressbook button, then Tools -> Import. Choose Addressbook, click Next. Choose “Text file (LDIF, .tab, .csv, .txt)” and click Next. Now find your text file of your contacts (You might want to select All Types for File Types to find a .txt file). Now you see a similar dialog.

Move the Display Name up to the first row (select Display name, and click Move Up). Move the Primary Email to the second row. Click OK, and you are done!

You can now send emails by just typing the contact name when composing. A few minutes of hassel solves a big problem. =)