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Import Windows Address Book preserving groups

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  • Last reply by Matt

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I'd like to import an Windows Address Book (.wab file) from Outlook Express on an old Win XP computer to Thunderbird on Linux preserving the groups it contains. There's an online tool at http://outlookexpress-thunderbird.7xl.org that converts wab to ldif format. It does a decent job and is more convenient than export via .csv files or commercial tools. Also, that tool preserves non-ASCII charsets, which comes handy as I have some Russian entries, these get mangled when exporting as csv. But none of these options will preserve groups and subdirectories contained in the wab file, so I'd have to recreate them manually as Thunderbird lists. As the file has about 10.000 entries that's very inconvenient. I've tried to import the wab file to Windows Contacts in Win 7 as an intermediary step, to import them to Thunderbird later, but hundreds of entries are missing and the Russian entries got mangled or disappeared.

I'd like to import an Windows Address Book (.wab file) from Outlook Express on an old Win XP computer to Thunderbird on Linux preserving the groups it contains. There's an online tool at http://outlookexpress-thunderbird.7xl.org that converts wab to ldif format. It does a decent job and is more convenient than export via .csv files or commercial tools. Also, that tool preserves non-ASCII charsets, which comes handy as I have some Russian entries, these get mangled when exporting as csv. But none of these options will preserve groups and subdirectories contained in the wab file, so I'd have to recreate them manually as Thunderbird lists. As the file has about 10.000 entries that's very inconvenient. I've tried to import the wab file to Windows Contacts in Win 7 as an intermediary step, to import them to Thunderbird later, but hundreds of entries are missing and the Russian entries got mangled or disappeared.

Modified by bnmm

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I don't think you going to get an answer to your question here. Thunderbird can import WAB files, then on an XP machine with outlook express installed. But the results you get are probably similar to that your got from importing into Windows contacts.