Homepage: http://www.neilvandyke.org/bbdb2tbird
Author: Neil Van Dyke
Updated:
Export Emacs BBDB to Thunderbird Address Book via LDIF
"bbdb2tbird.el" is an Emacs Lisp program I hacked up mostly on 2007-05-22 to
migrate my BBDB contact database of over 3000 entries to the Address Book of
Mozilla Thunderbird.
This was a one-shot conversion for my own personal use, and I'll not be
maintaining the program. That said, I suspect the program will also do the
job for most other people who are migrating from VM or Gnus to Thunderbird.
Documentation and user interface are minimal, but I figure most people with
substantial BBDB databases are pretty Emacs-savvy and can figure it out.
Note that this program does not properly convert non-ASCII characters.
Support for non-ASCII characters can be added by someone with Emacs Lisp
experience, especially if they used Emacs 22 rather than 21.
The basic usage procedure is:
1. Load "bbdb2tbird.el" into an Emacs that's configured to use your BBDB
database.
2. M-x bbdb2tbird RET
3. The "*bbdb2tbird*" buffer should now be in your window. Write this
buffer to a file name ending in ".ldif", such as "addressbook.ldif".
4. From the Thunderbird Address Book window, select the "Tools -> Import"
menu item and follow the prompts to import the ".ldif" file you just
wrote.
5. Once you've examined the imported address book entries and are
satisfied, you can move them from the category Thunderbird created
during import to the "Personal Address Book" category.
Warning: The Thunderbird Address Book is very limited and dumbed-down
compared to BBDB.
For purposes of future debugging, here are the versions of various involved
packages when I used when this program worked for me:
* GNU Emacs 21.4
* BBDB 2.35
* Icedove 1.5.0.10.dfsg1-3 (Debian packaging of a fork of Thunderbird)
HISTORY:
Version 1.1 (2007-06-01): Documentation changes.
Version 1.0 (2007-05-24): First and probably only release by Neil Van Dyke.