I’ve been using the Thunderbird email client for a couple of years now, prior to that I was using Pegasus Mail, but sometimes I’d prefer to be able to access my email online without having to worry about a program installed on an arbitrary laptop. As such, I thought it was time I exported by Thunderbird contacts and added them to my main Google mail account.It’s a breeze to export your whole address book from Thunderbird. Simply click the Address Book icon in the toolbar (or hit Ctrl 2 in Windows). Select the address book to export (I have all “collected” addresses added to my Personal Address Book in the program, so there is only one with any entries). Then choose the address book’s Tools menu and click Export. the default format is LDIF, but you can choose from Tab Delimited and Comma Separated. It’s the latter, comma separated (CSV) you want for GMail. Save the file.
Next, login into your GMail account and choose the Contacts link. Once you’re on that screen you will see two links in the blue above your current listing of contacts – Import Export. The choice is obvious – Import.
In the popup dialog box, browse for the CSV file you just created in the Thunderbird (or other email client). Now, click the Import Contacts button. GMail will extract each comma separated entry from the file and add each contact to your GMail contacts list. Now that is done, you can access your email contacts anywhere you can login to your GMail account.
Of course, Google is also rolling out IMAP access to GMail which will allow you to synchronize your email client with your email account too.
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