41590 - Moz Can't import from 4.7 Personal Address Book

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 35509

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Address Book & Contacts, defect, P3)

Description

[Akkana Peck]

I want my PAB on mozilla to be the same as the one I use on 4.7.  So, in 4.7, I
did Export... in the address book and saved to a file, then in mozilla I did
Import... and read the file in. In mozilla's import phase, it asks me which
format I want to use, but only offers one: Text.

If I name the exported 4.7 file abook.nab, then mozilla seems to see it, and
says it imported it, and now the addrbook window has three entries, for PAB,
Collected (even though I have that feature preffed off), and a new one, "abook"
(which was the name of the file).  That wasn't what I wanted -- I wanted the new
entries merged into my PAB -- but it doesn't matter because all three of these
are empty (at least, if I click on them, nothing shows up in the right pane).

If I name the exported 4.7 file abook.ldif, then mozilla gives a warning that no
address books were found, and a new abook line doesn't appear in the left pane
of the abook window.

Is there something I'm doing wrong?  And can I just take that 4.x file and copy
it somewhere into my mozilla hierarchy and have it work as the PAB?

Comment 1

[lchiang]

esther - can you help here?  We do have another bug about how the product will
create a new address book rather than put the addresses into Personal Address Book.

Comment 2

[scottputterman]

reassigning to chuang.

Comment 3

[chuang]

Export your pab as ldif file, choose text on Mozilla import.  It should import 
to a new address book with the file name.  If you want it to be your pab, 
there are 2 ways for now.
1. It's better you have only one imported address book. Find the "impab.mab" ( 
or "impab-n.mab") file in your profile directory and rename it to "abook.mab". 
2. Select all entries in the imported address book, drag over to your personal 
address book.  This won't work for mailing list though.

Comment 4

[Akkana Peck]

Thanks for the workaround -- now I can use the cool new autocomplete from my PAB!

Comment 5

[scottputterman]

moving to future.

Comment 6

[Akkana Peck]

Future?  You mean, in order to use their old personal addressbooks in 6.0,
people will have to figure out how to rename files by hand?

Comment 7

[Akkana Peck]

Adding relnote keyword: non developer geeks don't have a chance of finding this
bug or figuring this out on their own, and I'd like to have something to point
my friends to when they ask me, which will also tell them how to find their
profile directory on whatever platform they're on.

Comment 8

[pmock]

Changing qa assign to myself.

Comment 9

[fenella]

Assign it to myself..

Comment 10

[fenella]

Linux (2001-05-22-05 trunk)
Win32 (2001-05-22-06 trunk)
Mac (2001-05-21-15 trunk)
I am going to mark this bug worksforme because we can import from 4.7 Personal
Address Book now.

Comment 11

[fenella]

.

Comment 12

[timeless]

i'm going to reopen because i have no idea what you're talking about.

First, we in the mozilla bug system is mozilla, which can not import from nc4 (that's some bug that i touched repeatedly today). Second it's generally in poor style for one person to both resolve and verify a bug. Third when resolving worksforme it's appropriate to indicate the steps you took to show that it worked. Ideally in this stage it would have been clear to the average bugzilla.mozilla.org reader that you were using a commercial build and that they should have complained.

For reference, someone filed bug 111159 today which proves akkana's assertion in comment 7.  Reopening puts this bug back on the relnote radar, however i expect that it will be duped against one of the other open bugs.

Comment 13

[esther]

Note: timeless is correct the mozilla builds don't support direct importing of
4.7 address books (in the .na2 format).  As stated above, they still have to
export a book while in 4.7 to a .ldif file and then import into a mozilla build
address book, selecting Text (which give a description that it will import a
.ldif file as well as other text files).   This process works so this bug as
orginally written is worksforme in both commercial and mozilla builds.  A new
bug for mozilla only should be logged or this summary should change to Importing
of a 4.7 address book should be easier for the user to do.  Also note, when
importing we don't import into exisiting address books we import the book as a
separate book.  

Comment 14

[timeless]

*** Bug 114624 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 15

[timeless]

jatin/endico: please resurrect this relnote for 097 and beyond until the bug as 
currently summarized is fixed.

Comment 16

[Dawn Endico]

item readded to release notes

Comment 17

[Ninoschka Baca]

Changing summary from "Can't import from 4.7 Personal Address Book" to
"Moz Can't import from 4.7 Personal Address Book".

Comment 18

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

note, mozilla can't import .na2 files like the netscape version can, because 
the libneo code (from 4.x) is 3rd party proprietary.

note, you can export from 4.x to ldif, and then import the ldif.

Comment 19

[Robert Wall]

*** Bug 153113 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 20

[Michael Graubart]

If one exports a personal address book from Netscape 4.79, it will be called
Bookmarks.ldif.  This can be renamed, e.g. 'My address book.ldif', so as to
differentiate it from the existing personal address book in Mozilla, and can
then be imported into Mozilla.

Note, though, that if entries in the NS 4 address book did not have 'Prefers to
receive HTML' checked, the resulting entries in Mozilla will be marked 'plain
text' instead of 'unknown'.

Comment 21

[R.K.Aa.]

dup of bug 35509?

Comment 22

[Ninoschka Baca]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 35509 ***

Comment 23

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

vrfy

Comment 24

[B Viano]

I want my PAB on mozilla to be the same as the one I use on 4.7. I tried to use
the "Import tool", as described in the helps, ad to import "Address Book", bt
the programs shown in the appearing window are only Eudora, Outlook and .TXT (or
others strange formats).
What can I do?
Thenks

Comment 25

[Ray Charbonneau]

The success of the workarounds included here depend on the quality of your 
Netscape address book.  Mine is a mix of addresses enetered manually or 
imported from our Netscape LDAP directory using a variety of UI techniques.  

I can't sucessfully export an LDIF file.  I can export a CSV file, but the data 
is not consistantly organized, so the import into Mozilla is full of cruft. 

This issue is probably the cause of many of the similar bug reports 

Comment 26

[Ray Charbonneau]

Followup:
Using the simple method of creating an address book entry where each field is 
filled with the field name, I determined that exporting the NS4 address book to 
a tab delimited file was the most successful method.  Even then, 
the "Department" field was created in the export file, but not populated.

All personal mailing lists are lost.  Dunno if they're saved in an LDIF export -
 as I said, my PAB wouldn't export to that format (NS hangs).

I could import the tab delimited file into Mozilla, but couldn't get it to be 
the main address book using the file renaming method described above.  I went 
as far as to install NS7, which can directly import PABs from NS4, but the NS7 
importer also hung, perhaps for the same reason that the LDIF exporter hung.

Comment 27

[Ko de Groot]

I use Netscape 4.X which works under eCS.
I can't import the addressbook. 
I have read the suggestions and I tried to to what the wrote
It won't work.

How do I go on ?