April 04, 2005

Curious George - Exporting and Importing into Gmail Hola Monos, A friend of mine is finally getting off aol and onto gmail. She wants to export her contacts/address book from aol into a file that can be imported into gmail. AO-Hell will only export as a ldif file and gmail will only import from a cvs file. Any suggestions? And on a related note, I would love to export my contact info from my gmail account so's I can have it for my other email accounts. Has anyone figured out a way to do that yet?
posted by squidranch 19 years ago
  • AOL supports the IMAP protocol for email. I'd suggest setting up outlook (or thunderbird) and getting all your mail in one of those clients, it will make it easier to export it to a more popular format. The next step is to load it into GMail. For this, you could use GMail Loader or one of the dozen other apps on the site. Hope this helps :-)
  • Wait a minute. AOL exports its address book as LDIF? That rocks! I'm guessing then that they use LDAP behind the scenes, but I wonder what caused them to decide to export it raw.
  • From the Gmail support pages: AOL doesn’t have the functionality to export your address book, so you’ll have to create a custom CSV file if you use this service. You can use Excel to create a .csv [save as: 'CSV (Comma delimited)] Thats pretty much how I got my contacts out of Hotmail.