I discovered that directly importing from GMail to Thunderbird (hereinafter TB) loses all important information and leaves the address-book non-functional. So I thought I’d write here the way I got it working.
- In your google account, goto Contacts.
- Click on the “Export” link on the top right side of the box.
- Export it in “Outlook CSV” format and save the file to a desirable location.
- Open Microsoft Outlook (2007 in my case) and goto File -> Import and Export.
- Make sure “Import from another program or file” is highlighted and click “Next”
- Select “Comma separated values (Windows)” and click “Next”
- Select the downloaded file and click “Next”
- In the “Select destination folder” area, highlight the “Contacts” entry and click “Next”
- Click the “Finish button”. Outlook will import all contact, please wait while it does that.
- Once finished, close Outlook and launch Thunderbird.
- In the Thunderbird window, goto Tools -> Import
- Select “Address Books” option and click “Next”
- Select “Outlook” from the menu and click “Next”
- Click the “Finish” button and you’re done!
That should be all. This is just a 10 minute procedure that will import all your Google mail contacts to Thunderbird. Enjoy!
I almost gave up trying to get this working. Thanks to this post, my address book is functional again! Thank you
Totally cool bro!! My contacts are back!
Why do you use a longer way of doing this when the direct import works perfectly?
Doesn’t work for me (as already described in blog post). I don’t see the “name” or “last name” areas when importing directly, and hence, the addressbook becomes useless.
Exactly, just as sayakb said, I have the same problem when importing directly.