Windows Address Book help required.

[AndyP & Lenore]

We had a power blackout on Saturday night in the middle of Gala. Despite our PC's being hooked up to a very meaty UPS with surge protection, we still lost the power supply and motherboard on one of our PC's.

So, picked up a terrific deal from Aldi's of all places. MEDION PC, AMD Athlon II Quad Core, 3GB Ram, 1TB HD DV, etc, etc.

We managed to rescue the hard drive from the blown PC and all data is intact, mostly backed up anyway. Got a SATA caddy to turn it into an external drive.

With the old PC we were running XP and used Outlook Express for emails.

Windaes 7 on new PC - which is stunning btw - doesn't use OE so installed Mozilla Thunderbird and it works fine.

Does anyone know how to import the Windows Address Book from the old PC's hard drive into Thunderbird? To be honest, a search on this hard drive for *.wab doesn't even come up with anything, which is very strange. I've found wab32.dll and wab32res.dll in C:program files/common files/system - but Neither OE on our laptop or Thunderbird on the new PC are interested in importing them as an address book.

Anyone got any words of wisdom?

A.

[Burple]

Is this similar to what you've tried already?

http://www.howtoforge.com/importing_outlook_express_into_thunderbird_evoluti on (http://www.freeemailtutorials.com/mozillaThunderbird/importingContacts.cwd)

Could it be that Thunderbird is looking for default folder on C:\ Program files where the outlook express install should be and not finding it? Isnce your 'caddy'd drive will now have another suffix since it's (I'm presuming) USB mounted?
Can you point the Thunderbird import to the correct folder on the correct drive?
(never used Thunderbird, so I've never had to try any of this).

You don't want to be importing any .dll files as address books...

Weird that a search doesn't find the .wab file tho. Don't mean this to sound like a stupid question... but in your old PC.. was there only one HD? :hand:

One of these times it's easier to be sitting at the pc in question! :D

[AndyP & Lenore]

Cheers Euan.

Making some progress... located the WAB file, thanks to expert telephone help from MrD. Thunderbird is not interested in importing from it though. Exported it to CSV file and it has imported that but it hasn't imported any folders or organisation, so it's just an alphabetical list of all the email addresses we have, nae use. So, next thing is to install Thunderbird on the laptop, import the WAB straight from OE into Thunderbird, whcih should help it keep it's formatting. Then export that address book in "Thunderbird" format and then import to the new PC.

Here's hoping.

A.

[euan]

On a related subject, I've found that the Google mail was good at managing addresses - it's the master source I use for my iPhone - exported from Lotus Notes, re-import into google mail, sorted out the contacts then did the over the air sync to my contacts on the iPhone. Everything is now in check between the two, though I don't have the contacts in Thunderbird (which I also use). From there, I guess you could export the contacts from Google and re-import into Thunderbird?