Take Your Gmail Contacts to Thunderbird (Mac Only)
November 8, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (2)

As soon as Gmail rolled out IMAP support I jumped on the band wagon and started configuring Mail.app and dipping my toes back into the desktop email client waters. Things didn't go as smoothly as I hoped. I found the combination of IMAP, Gmail and Mail to be less than optimal. Then I found Lifehacker's article on how to "Turn Thunderbird into the Ultimate Gmail IMAP Client" and decided to give Thunderbird a go. A week in I find Thunderbird to be pretty great and using it in concert with Gmail is working out pretty well. One major problem though is that, as far as I can find, there isn't a direct or simple process for getting your Gmail contacts into Thunderbird. You can export your Gmail contacts into a .csv file but it doesn't play nicely with Thunderbird in my experience. It doesn't play nicely with Address Book either (I know I tried getting my Gmail contacts into Address Book over the summer).

After much digging I finally found a work around for getting Gmail contacts relatively neatly into Address Book. I also found a work around for getting Address Book contacts into Thunderbird. Put those two processes together and you've got your Gmail contacts in Thunderbird.

Let me warn you that this is a rather convoluted process that requires you to download and run an Apple Script and an application and even then your address book probably won't be exactly perfect (meaning you'll have to either edit a .csv file or edit your contacts post-Thunderbird import) nor will your Gmail contacts and your Thunderbird contacts stay synced. The lack of syncing is obviously not ideal. However, I have a rather large, static base of contacts that I needed to have in Thunderbird that doesn't get changed. The number of new contacts I get it isn't minuscule but it is small enough that I can manually add them to both places if need be. If you get 15 new contacts a day this probably isn't an optimal solution for you.

The first step is in this process is exporting your Gmail contacts. In the export options choose Gmail to Outlook CSV. Next download Steve Roy's Address Book Importer 2.0.5. This app is free if you use it only once. If you want to use it more a $10 fee is requested. Address Book Importer has a drag and drop interface that allows you to get the contact information from the Gmail .csv into the proper address book fields. Depending on how meticulously detailed your Gmail contacts list is you could be dragging and dropping a lot or a little. Either way this is going to take a little time. I accepted that, went through the process and was happy I did.

After your Gmail contacts have been safely imported into Address Book download and run the Address Book to CSV AppleScript from Sean Long (hint get the full package listed in the comments of that link instead of just the .scpt file). This script will spit out all of the contacts in Address Book into a new .csv file. The drag and drop process you used with Address Book Importer should have allowed the new .csv file to be nice and tidy and just the way you like it. Meaning it will play nicely with Thunderbird unlike the original .csv file that Gmail created.

So just go to your Thunderbird address book, import the new .csv file and think to yourself "There has got to be an easier way than this but I'm glad this worked for now."

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