Import address lists into OS X from AOL Classic

Apr 02, '04 10:41:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I was attempting to get my Mother to swap from AOL to the Apple address book, so I looked on macosxhints to find a way. I found an article that suggested downloading an OS X 'lite' version of AOL (18mb) then Mozilla (14ish). With a 56K modem, this was not a possibility, so I persevered and found a different way.

In AOL (version 5 running in Classic), create a new email, go to its Address Book and select all the names -- these can then be pasted into a text file. Then click 'To' to create an eamil with all the addresses, and select and copy all these into a second text file. Open both text files in Excel (or AppleWorks spreadsheet module) and copy and past so that the first name, surname and email addresses are in three consecutive columns. This can then be saved as a text file and imported into Entourage (or Palm I expect, though I did it into Entourage).

You have to work the field mapping when you import -- that took me a while to fugure out. Click to highlight beside the mapped field title, then you can import from Entourage (or similar) using the script menu in the Apple Address Book program.

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one, and the hint as originally written was sort of hard to understand. Hopefully I didn't introduce any errors during my cleanup, but since the author didn't provide an email address, I can't verify my work -- so please, Anonymous users, include an email address just in case. I promise it won't be published nor shared...]

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