How To Import Contacts To Outlook?

MS Outlook is one of the series of Outlook products that Microsoft kept offering for free as part of its Windows releases. The initial version had enough bugs and issues, which determined many users to become loyal to other desktop email clients, such as Thunderbird, The Bat, etc. All these provided an interesting diversity and unique solutions to the same problems. The situation seems to have changed nowadays when Outlook has become a much more refined product with an incredibly large user base (approximately 400 million people).

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The Past Of MS Outlook And The Competition

At the same, many other email clients simply could not keep the pace with the market or simply found the efforts financially unjustified. A typical example is Thunderbird, the open source application developed by Mozilla that had a fairly large popularity in the last decade. This situation required many loyal users to export Thunderbird to Outlook in order to address the insecurity related to the future of Mozilla’s product. Fortunately, such migration is made possible by specialized software.

Exporting Contacts From Other Email Clients

Software tools that allow one to import emails from specific email clients also normally help to import contacts to Outlook from the same applications. All this data is ultimately integrated into the PST file (the native storage format for the Microsoft application). With certain applications, it might be required to export email or contact data into a universal format such as .eml files in the first case and .vCard files in the second case. In the case of Thunderbird, there are tools that can perform the conversion without any additional export steps.

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Things To Take Into Account When Choosing An Appropriate Conversion Tool

        The size of contact data is usually minuscule compared to that of emails plus attachments. Nevertheless, it might very tiresome to transform each record in the appropriate format for MS Outlook by hand. This alone can justify the use of specially designed applications. When considering what to expect from a software tool that would help you efficiently export both the emails and the contacts from an application like Thunderbird, the following things should be aimed for:

  • a decluttered and intuitive user interface that hides unnecessary complexity;
  • automatic location of the Thunderbird installation folder (and specifically, of contact files) – often, folders don’t have intuitive names and even so, contact files might be difficult to locate, so it’s better when the software manages this problem;
  • direct output either to your Outlook account or to a PST file on the local hard drive;
  • full automation of the conversion process;
  • avoiding uploading sensitive information (emails or contacts) to an online platform or server. In other words, it is better when the conversion is processed locally, on your device.

Conclusion

To conclude, it seems that the long development history of a product aimed both towards enterprises and individuals finally paid out, with MS Outlook becoming the most popular option on the market. Given its ongoing quality support and clear prospects for the future, it is also a product to which even many loyal users of other competing platforms (e.g. Thunderbird) migrate. Regardless of whether email or contact data needs to be transferred, this can be easily achieved by using specialized software tools.