INSTRUCTIONS

This simple guide shows you how to export contacts from entourage into thunderbird on the mac.
This is a fairly simple task, and you would think it would be easy, however the export options within
entourage are far from extensive. The only options you have is to export to Tab Text, this is fine, however
you may run into issues importing these back into thunderbird because unfortunately thunderbird seems
hopelessly unaware of which fields map to the header fields in the data.
I managed to get the contacts over but in a slightly convoluted way.

! Drag all of the contacts from entourage into Mac OS X Address Book.
! From here you can export all of them in one go, as a vCard File ( This will have the extension .vcf)
! This file cannot be used directly with thunderbird they need to be converted into an LDIF file there
are several tools for this task, I have found a very good online converter at http://labs.brotherli.com/
vcfconvert that seems to do the job.
! Tell Thunderbird to import this LDIF file and you should be good to go.
All of your contacts should now appear in thunderbird from within address book.

Thanks for reading this guide
Nick Smith

Tags: email, client, thunderbird