Fighting Outlook and Evolution - How to move your address book from Outlook to Evolution

Having trouble migrating your address book from Outlook to Evolution? I did. I had a lot of contacts in Outlook, but I was unable to export these because the Import/Export engine was not installed, and the CD was not to be found. So, then what? I searched around online, looking for utilities to convert file formats like pst to something Evolution could understand, but with no luck. I forwarded all my contacts as attachments in an email, but Evolution doesn't have the functionality to open/save/import many attachments (or files) at once. And here's me thinking things were supposed to be easier with computers in the 21st century...

Here's a short recipe of how I moved my address book. Beware, your success with these instructions may vary, but it seemed to work well enough for me.

• Open your Contacts page in Outlook, and hit Ctrl-A to select all of them.
• Select Actions -> Forward as vCard.
• Send this mail (which has lots of attachments) to an account accessible from Evolution.
• Open the mail in Evolution, and save it to a file (File -> Save As...). The file name is not important, but I will assume the filename is "mail".
• Run a command like this:
  

  cat mail | perl -ne 'chomp; if ($_ eq "BEGIN:VCARD") { $p=1; }; print $_,"\n" if $p; if ($_ eq "END:VCARD") { $p = 0; }' > vcards.vcf

• In Evolution, go to File -> Import, select single file, choose vcards.vcf, select vCard file format, and hey presto, all your contacts should be imported into your Evolution address book.

(C) 2004, Ketil Froyn