Import contacts to Yahoo Mail

agrinnall

I'm trying to help a friend get their contacts from Entourage into BT Yahoo Mail. I've exported the contacts from Entourage to a tab delimited .txt file, opened that in Excel and saved the data as a .csv file. When I try to import that file from Yahoo it seems to load the names into the contact list but nothing else.

Because I'm not great with a Mac I've been attempting to get it to work on my PC using an old Ymail account I had. I've stripped out all the unnecessary data from the file so it just contains first name, last name and email address 1. The import appears to work successfully but I'm still just getting first name and last name.

Any thought on what I might be doing wrong? Has anyone else successfuly imported contacts?

Figment

Check the layout of the csv file exactly matches the requirements for importing into Yahoo. (You are aware that each comma in the csv tells the import routine to move to the next field (i.e. two commas together skips a field?)

Example:
First_name, Last_name, email_address
would put First_name into the first field, Last_name into the second, email_address into the third; whereas
First_name,, Last_name, email_address (note the extra comma)
would put First_name into the first field, nothing in the second, Last_name into the third, email_address into the fourth

Does Yahoo import have a field mapper? If so, check the fields in the csv are correctly mapped to the corresponding fields in Yahoo.

agrinnall

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a map that I can find. As a test I tried exporting my own contacts from Thunderbird directly to a csv file (which isn't something that can be done in Entourage) and had the same result with the import.

However, your post has made me think of a way of finding out the field map, I'll set up a few contacts in Ymail then export them and have a look at the layout of that file. Maybe that will then give me some clues on what's needed for the import file.

-TangleFoot-

I've successfully transferred contacts exported as vCard files before, though I had to join them all together in Windows to import them all at once.

Does this help?

agrinnall

Thanks for that, I had wondered about vCard but I couldn't see how to export in that format. At least I've got some more options now so I'll give it a try and report back.

agrinnall

Success! Doing an export to get the file format did the trick. Thanks for the suggestions.

Cash-Strapped.T32

I've got something of a fetish for .csv files, I use them to backup all my contacts across email & phone - When I get a new number or contact I add it to my contacts master, this is then uploaded to gmail-proper & everything syncs from that.

However imo Excel can be a pain to use to edit csvs because it has that nasty habit of omitting leading zeroes - I know there's ways around that in the file itself but it's still a pain, so personally I prefer to just edit the file in notepad but save it with a .csv extension - Once I'd used excel's export to correctly map the fields to Gmail the first time I could just use the existing file to make small additions in notepad, usually just adding a new line with a new name & email/number.