Migrating an address book from Outlook Express 5 on Mac OS9 to Apple Mail

Recently I was tasked with an address book migration from a Microsoft Outlook Express 5 client running on OS9 into an Address Book application on Mac OSX 10.3 “Panther”. Needless to say, it wasn’t a straightforward task.

Outlook Express 5 on OS9 exports the contact details in a tab delimited format, which seems to be the only format. Apple’s Address Book in Panther supports only LDIF and vCard imports. There are several ways of doing that.

One

Mozilla Thunderbird to the rescue. It allows a flat file address book import (tab delimited in our case):

…and export in LDIF format:

Two

In Finder, open Library (system, not the user one) > Scripts > Address Book Scripts. You will see a “Import Addresses.scpt” AppleScript file (if the file is nowhere to be found, search for the name). Fire it up by double clicking it (you might have to have your Address Book application open) – it will guide you through the import process of your address book in a flat file format.

Three

Go to CSV2vCard page and use a readily available JavaScript-based converter of comma and tab delimited files into a vCard format, that can then be easily imported into Address Book on OSX and is understood by a much wider variety of programs and devices (SonyEricsson devices come to mind).