Importing Addresses into Thunderbird

[Tommy Trussell]

On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 7:38 AM, Wade Smart <wadesmart at gmail.com> wrote:
> 20080903 0736 GMT-6
>
> Im trying to import a few hundred addresses into Thunderbird. I have
> them in a CVS file - First Name, Last Name, Primary Email but I cant
> seem to get Thunderbird to pull them correctly. It has all these other
> fields like work and home phone that are auto populated with my other
> First, Last and Primary users information.
>
> Wade

Greetings -- CSV (Comma Separated Value) files are fairly "universal"
but they do have some problems that can trip you up.

a) Line Endings -- if you created the CSV on a Mac or a Windows PC for
instance, those two platforms use different line ending characters
than linux. (Macs use <cr>, Linux uses <lf> and Windows uses <cr><lf>.
<cr> = ^M and <lf>= ^J.) Most CSV importers are "smart" enough to
detect it, but you can open the file in a text editor and see whether
the lines end how and where they're supposed to.

b) Missing or extraneous commas -- If you created the CSV yourself,
it's easy to drop or add commas, so check it carefully. Also look for
data that CONTAINS commas, such as a City, ST pair in an address, or a
comma in someone's name. Most CSV exporters put quotation marks around
problematic data, but that isn't foolproof. You might have to edit the
file to get rid of the troublesome ones.

c) Extraneous line endings -- If your data CONTAINS line endings (such
as multi-line comments or address lines) you may have to replace the
extra line endings with something for the import. I like to use the
"pipe" character -- | -- because it's distinctive and it never appears
in my address data otherwise.

The easiest way to check is to open the CSV file in a text editor, and
then do a test import into a spreadsheet. You can look at both and see
the cause of the problem. If the file imports properly into the
spreadsheet, try re-saving it from the spreadsheet to eliminate a
line-ending issue.

If those are too difficult for some reason, I believe Thunderbird will
import several different formats, so you can try re-exporting the data
in another format that Thunderbird will read. Most other formats have
ways of dealing with the extra characters that trip up CSV.