Migrating Contacts from SmarterMail to Gmail

eric — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 01:58:00 GMT

Since 1998 or 1999, Brad and I have hosted Smips at CrystalTech and have thrilled with their service. However, recently he and I have been a tad bit annoyed at the amount of spam we are receiving through their webmail client SmarterMail. About 30 spam messages a day were filtering through and I was getting tired of deleting them.

So Brad and I decided to try using Gmail to read our Smips mail. Within minutes I had Gmail set up to read my email and I was ready to go. Now all I needed was to import my contacts from SmarterMail over to Gmail and I'd be done.

Unfortunately for me SmarterMail only exports to VCards and Gmail only supports CSV. If I had Outlook installed I could have simply imported the VCards and re-exported, but I don't have Outlook so that option was out the window. Ah but I do have Thunderbird, sweet sweet Thunderbird and all it's free Mozilla Foundation glory. Surely Thunderbird can fix my problems. I'm afraid not, out of the box Thunderbird will not import the VCards. My first instinct was to use the Mozilla add-ons search to dig up an add-on to take care of the importing for me. There was not an add-on to be found. So with a Google search I was able to find this add-on MoreFunctionsForAddressBook. I installed it and it worked like a charm, so now I was able to use Thunderbird to export my contacts to CSV format and I would be on my way.

I launched Gmail and pointed it to my exported contact list and wham bam I have my contacts. Uh, why are the names not showing up in my contact list. All I see is about 200 "Unknown Contacts", well thst sucks, because this didn't really work.

So at this point I can edit all 200 contacts by hand or find an alternative. I'm lazy, so alternatives here I come!

Maybe, just maybe Outlook Express will do what I need. Lord help me, I haven't used Outlook Express in six or more years. I search my computer for Outlook Express and I didn't have it installed. Instead I have something called Windows Email. Huh, didn't know that but maybe Vista and it's goodness will fix my problems. I found a Vista help article that said it could import my VCards and then I could export them to another format. This is fantastic, now I'm excited, all I have to do is open my Contacts folder and press the Import button. Yeah, but I don't have an import button in my Contacts folder! I really want an import button, I'm so close I can feel it. With another Google search I found my answer. Now why I had to do this, I don't know but I did and it worked. I pressed the import button and I was able to import all my VCards.

I then exported to CSV and imported them into Gmail with no problems. So all in all Vista was helpful, Vista helpful really?, yes really!

So to summarize:

Export contacts as VCards
With Vista, Open Contacts folder and Import contacts
Export Contacts to CSV
Import CSV into Gmail contacts and you are done

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IIS is giving me a 404 error for my MonoRails app

eric — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 03:13:00 GMT

I was recently working on a MonoRails application. It was more a less a basic CRUD website for the admins to massage their data. We wanted to use the built in scaffolding for the application, but we choose just to create the custom pages using the helpers that MonoRails provides.

We push to production and begin to test the site out. The way the site works is we use Forms Authentication tied to the company's Activie Directory server. Upon a succesful login, the user is redirected to the MonoRail application. The login part worked fine but when the site was redirected, we would get a 404 error. The url was showing the correct controller and action the site acted as if the page did not exist.

Well I was left scratching my head because as far as I knew I had done everything right. I went back to the installing Monorails webpage and went over all the steps. Everything looked good to me. I had created the .rails extension and routed it through the aspnet_isapi.dll, so I wasn't sure what else could be wrong. It was late so I stopped for the night figuring I'd tackle it fresh in the morning.

The next day I spent less than 30 minutes on the problem before I figured it out. All that I had to do was Uncheck the Check file exists check box as it so clearly states in the instructions.

Makes me wonder how I got through college. So this is just a reminder to myself and other as to how important it is to read instructions and read them slowly.

- e r i c

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Smips.com

Migrating Contacts from SmarterMail to Gmail

IIS is giving me a 404 error for my MonoRails app