I keep my primary address book in Outlook, but I wanted to export it to Thunderbird so that when I’m using Thunderbird at home, I have easy access to all the email addresses I’ve stored in Outlook.
It’s easy to import from Outlook to Thunderbird on Windows, since Thunderbird will happily allow you to do the import directly. However, it’s more difficult when you want to export from Outlook on Windows and import the data into Thunderbird on UNIX. In that case, you need to export your Outlook data into a CSV file, copy the resulting file over to UNIX, and import it into Thunderbird there.
This is theoretically possible, since Thunderbird does know how to import a CSV file, but it’s difficult, for two reasons. First of all, Thunderbird will only read 35 columns from the Outlook CSV file, so some of the Outlook data is inaccessible. Second, the UI for mapping Thunderbird address-book fields to columns in the Outlook-generated CSV is confusing and difficult to use.
I Googled a bit to see if anyone had come up with an easy solution to this problem. I didn’t find one, so I solved it myself, by writing a script to convert the CSV file generated by Outlook into a format which is much more palatable to Thunderbird.
![[Digg]](http://blog.kamens.us/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Facebook]](http://blog.kamens.us/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png)
![[Email]](http://blog.kamens.us/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
