Move AOL addresses to Address Book

Feb 05, '04 09:07:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I spent a lot of time trying to find a way to get AOL addresses into Address Book. I have finally found a solution. Over on kdub's blog, he writes:

This weekend I had to move over my Mom's AOL address book to OS X's address book. AOL has its address book stored in binary form inside the application setting files so it wasn't an easy thing to do. Luckly AOL recently released a beta of AOL Communicator for OS X. Communicator is a basically AOL lite which allows you to use AOL features (like email and IM) in a small application that is actually based around Mozilla's XUL.

Anyway, Communicator can export the AOL address book into LDIF format. I thought this would be perfect, since OS X's Address Book can import that format. It turns out that for some reason, OS X's Address Book refused to import the LDIF file that Communicator exported. So I downloaded Mozilla and used its address book app to import the AOL LDIF file. This worked perfectly, especially since Mozilla can export addresses to CSV format. I took the CSV file and then imported that into Entourage, which I know could export vCards, the only other format OS X's Address Book reconizes.

I simply dragged all the address book entries out of Entourage and into OS X's address book and they imported perfectly. Quite a few steps to go through but I was impressed I actually got it to work with out resorting to some manual copy and paste.
This is very helpful. Since OS 9, there hasn't been a way to import AOL addresses into other applications, at least no easy way. This seems like a great workaround, though it involves a few steps.

Comments (16)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040129010832290