Exporting Netscape/Mozilla 6.x address book SOLUTION

[Simon Cousins]

Hi Barry,

I'm cross posting this personal reply to the list so as to enter the
tricky business of rescuing an addressbook out of Netscape/Mozilla into
the hive mind.

I guess you have the same issue that I (and others) have had -- you were
able to import your addressbook into Nutscrape, but then unable to
export your precious data to any other file format, let alone app.
You've probably tried a dozen hacks, including uploading into Netcentre
(which doesn't work), Yahoo (ditto), and trawling your disk for useable
data.

I'd almost given up until another user contacted me with our shared
problem, and we decided to crack it together.

1. You need to use Dawn, a freeware addressbook converter app.  Don't
bother with the Linux version (sad to say) because it doesn't work.  You
need to use the Windows version.  I did my operation on a W2K box, and
it was utterly stable.  Dawn is at
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zakharin/Software/Dawn.html

2. You need to locate your Netscape/Mozilla addressbook.  It should
either have a .mab or .na2 extension.  It probably lives in
~/.mozilla/username/something.slt/something.mab  You need to get this
file over to your Windows/Dawn machine.  Use samba, it rocks.  NB: Dawn
may choke on your file if it's very large.  My friend's 300 entry file
worked okay in his first run, but my 1800+ entry file repeatedly failed.
The strategy that worked for me was to split my addressbook (in
Netscape/Mozilla) into 14 separate addressbooks (AB, CD, EF, etc), then
processing each smaller file into the new main file in Dawn.

3. Dawn may not recognise your .mab.  If this is the case, tell Dawn to
Load an LDAP file, and in the browse dialogue box, type the name of the
actual sourcefile (with extension) and hit go.

4. Dawn should have opened the file correctly and guessed pretty
accurately at the fields.  Browse your new file, de-dupe or munge your
new file anyway you wish in Dawn (it's pretty nifty) and save it out in
a few different file formats for safety's sake.  Then you're free to
import your file into whatever your new preferred mail-client may be.

Good luck!

--

Simon Cousins
simon at simoncousins.com


> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: Barry Dalton [mailto:radiodoc at rvi.net]
> >Sent: Sunday, 30 December 2001 10:46 AM
> >To: simon at simoncousins.com
> >Subject: exporting Netscape 6.2 Address book
> >
> >Hello, I just read your post on
> >www.vicnet.net.au/help/other/troubleshooting/
> >regarding  " how  do you export Netscape 6.2 address book?" Sat, 21
Apr
> >2001 .
> > Have you found a way to do this ? I have come to the same conclusion
> >that you did in your post. I have emailed Netscape. com and am not
going
> >to
> >hold my breath waiting for an answer :>)
> >Regards,
> >Barry