Transferring and converting an address book from one mail client or computer to another

Transferring address books from a mail client or computer to another can be a problem. Converting it between different mail client software can be an even bigger problem. There are lots of conversion add-ons, tools and Unix oneliners available. However, this can be a time consuming task.

The solution is to convert using the standard address book format vCard, which is a file, that contains one or more entries of contacts. Every contact can have different records, such as name, mail address, phone number and more.

In this example, we will transfer and convert an address book from the old text based open source mail client Alpine to the graphical newer open source mail client Evolution Mail. Alpine is also known as Pine.

The address book, that Alpine uses, are stored in a hidden file. If not installed, we install 2vcard, which is an open source utility, that can convert address books from a number of mail clients to a vCard file. 2vcard is available as a tarball. We use 2vcard to convert our address book to a vCard file.

su -
ftp http://www.netmeister.org/apps/2vcard-0.5.tar.gz
gunzip 2vcard-0.5.tar.gz
tar xvf 2vcard-0.5.tar
cd 2vcard-0.5
make install
logout
/usr/local/bin/2vcard -F
/usr/local/bin/2vcard -f pine -i .addressbook -o addressbook
cat addressbook

Now, we have a vCard file, that contains our contacts. We make the vCard file available to our Evolution Mail client and click File and Import. A guide popup. We click Forward, “Import a single file”, Forward, sets Filename to our vCard file and click Open. The guide recognizes our file as a vCard file. We click Forward, accept the Personal address book, click Forward and Import.

Now, the address book is imported and we can edit it, if necessary.