On 1/16/09 7:23 AM, "SuzT808" <[email protected]> wrote: > I have review the Entourage Help Page and didn't find a close enough > suggestion to try to convert an address book from thunderbird. Just wondering > if anyone has a suggestion on the best way to migrate a thunderbird address > book of over 1000 entries with many distribution groups over to Entourage > 2004. I am particularly concerned with the groups migrating over intact.
Using Thunderbird's Tools --> Export... command, which is only visible when viewing the Address Book, you can create a comma or tab separated file. Entourage can import this into its Address Book. Unfortunately, Thunderbird doesn't export groups and Entourage doesn't import groups. And while Entourage can be scripted with AppleScript, Thunderbird isn't scriptable. So no systematic way exists to get information out of one and into the other. But I did find this... I noticed that I can print the Thunderbird Address Book to a PDF (use the Preview button in the Print dialog) and I actually get every group with a list of E-mail addresses included with the PDF print-out. Next, I highlighted those addresses and copied them using Edit --> Copy. I had to manually create the new Entourage Group in Entourage but I was able to Paste my copied addresses into the Group. This step *does not* create contact records in Entourage. Finally, I imported the tab-delimited file from Thunderbird into Entourage. This isn't as automated as I'd like but it beats having to retype individual addresses and adding them one at a time to groups. If you need more details let me know. I might consider this worth a blog post. On a final note, Thunderbird's address book file is a plain text file. With some work it could be manipulated by AppleScript into a format that could probably systematically import addresses and groups into Entourage. I'll look into doing it but developing this script would take a while. Hope this helps! -- bill Entourage Help Page <http://entourage.mvps.org/> Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/> YouTalk <http://nine.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/youtalk> Twitter: follow <http://twitter.com/meck> YouTalk mailing list List address: [email protected] List information: http://entourage.mvps.org/support_options/list.html List moderator: [email protected]
