Migrating Contacts from SmarterMail to Gmail
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