There have been hints about migrating contacts from Outlook to Address Book and about migrating Address Book to Thunderbird. Now we have a delightfully easy way to go straight from Outlook 2003 contacts to Thunderbird's address book, courtesy of the fine folks at the contact-management service Plaxo.
While some may be suspicious of Plaxo's PC-centric bent up until now (anticipated Entourage sync tools, text import options and AOL integration notwithstanding), and the "please help me update my address book" e-mails can be annoying, there's no easier way to webify your Outlook contacts than Plaxo. Now, with the release of the beta Thunderbird connector, getting Outlook contacts into Thunderbird on the Mac is as simple as installing the Plaxo connector on both machines and signing up for a free account. Plaxo will sync up the Outlook contacts and sync them back to Thunderbird ... almost like magic!
Having now put my contacts through a five-way wringer over the past couple of weeks [Now Contact 5 -> (vCards) -> Apple Address Book -> (e2Sync) -> Entourage -> (Exchange server) -> Outlook -> (plaxo) -> Thunderbird], I think I'll let them rest easy for a bit!
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050816190229920