Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Our son is on the verge of switching his email from AOL to Gmail. The one sticking point: moving his AOL address book into Gmail. Thanks to an article in the Washington Post and Gmail's import help page, I did it. Sort of. Here's how.

1. Sign in to AOL and use the keyword "Communicator" to find AOL's free email client. Download it and install it.

2. Run it. Go to the addressbook. Select "All contacts" from the categories on the left. Go to File > Export and save it. You now have an LDIF file.

3. If you don't already have a copy of Thunderbird, go get yourself one. It's free. (It's also a damn good mail client.)

4. Go to Tools > Address book in Thunderbird. In the address book do Tools > Import, and import the LDIF file you created. Thunderbird will make a new address book in the list in the left pane, so you don't have to worry that your AOL addresses will get sprinkled among your others.

5. In Thunderbird's address book, select the address book you just imported, do Tools > Export and export it as a CSV (comma separated) file. You now have a file that Gmail can import. Sort of.

6. Log into Gmail. Click on the Contacts link to the left. In the Contacts window, click on the Import link in the upper right. Browse to the CSV file and click "Import." It'll probably fail.

7. Open the CSV file with a spreadsheet program. Delete empty columns an. Add a first row that provides a label for each column. Try using the labels "First Name," "Last Name," "Email Address," "Street Address" and "Phone." (I couldn't get anything to import except the names and email addresses, but I gave up because it was going to be easier to manually type in the few phone numbers, etc. If you have a more complex address book, you should experiment more than I did.)

8. Save the spreadsheet as a CSV file.

9. Repeat step #6

10. Call up AOL and tell them to bite you. They may not deserve it, but you've earned it.

It's just that simple!