How get my TB Address book into my current earthlink? (web mail)

[Kingdaddy]

Windows 7. TB 78.5.1
No luck with Google, so I go back to my historic experiences...
and having trouble.

Earthlink web mail rejects the excel generated csv, too. Same message...

Your contacts could not be imported. The file containing your contacts
does not appear to be formatted properly. For more information please
click on Web Mail Help and see the Troubleshooting section.

So I tried to import it into Thunderbird:
TB new tool to import many "address books" and more...gets error, too.

"An error occurred importing address from Text
file(LDIF, .tab, .csv, .txt).

Thunderbird can't process the excel generated csv.

The samples are from an aged Excel 9.0.2720. I looked at it with a text
editor, and it looks correct.

Example:
Dee,Weeks,VimeoSupport,,dmw...@yahoo.com,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Here is one with no first and second name.
,,Pat Cherry,,gte...@ncsu.edu,,,,,,,

The loose end I have not answered yet,
I have many rows with no first and second name.
Is that in issue with the newer import routines?

Any suggestions?

Carl

[John Weiss]

The first 2 entries are "First:" and "Last: names. The 3rd entry is
"Display:" name, which is the one often imported when you simply click
on a "Add to address Book" button. You might try manually adding the
missing First and Last names.

Also, especially if you added any custom entries to the address book,
you may have to go through a field association routine.

[Big Al]

A proper export of TB or for that fact most, will have a headers row on line 1.
The first two lines of my TB export are as follows:

First Name,Last Name,Display Name,Nickname,Primary Email,Secondary Email,Screen Name,Work Phone,Home Phone,Fax Number,Pager Number,Mobile
Number,Home Address,Home Address 2,Home City,Home State,Home ZipCode,Home Country,Work Address,Work Address 2,Work City,Work State,Work
ZipCode,Work Country,Job Title,Department,Organization,Web Page 1,Web Page 2,Birth Year,Birth Month,Birth Day,Custom 1,Custom 2,Custom
3,Custom 4,Notes,
,,Amazon - account update,,account...@amazon.com,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

If you get word wrap, everything from FIRST NAME to NOTES, is the header defining the fields in TB.
The one line with Amazon on it is the address book export. Yes, it has little to no fields filled.

These next lines are from Gmail contacts using a browser:

Name,Given Name,Additional Name,Family Name,Yomi Name,Given Name Yomi,Additional Name Yomi,Family Name Yomi,Name Prefix,Name
Suffix,Initials,Nickname,Short Name,Maiden Name,Birthday,Gender,Location,Billing Information,Directory
Server,Mileage,Occupation,Hobby,Sensitivity,Priority,Subject,Notes,Language,Photo,Group Membership,E-mail 1 - Type,E-mail 1 - Value,E-mail 2
- Type,E-mail 2 - Value,Phone 1 - Type,Phone 1 - Value,Phone 2 - Type,Phone 2 - Value,Phone 3 - Type,Phone 3 - Value,Address 1 -
Type,Address 1 - Formatted,Address 1 - Street,Address 1 - City,Address 1 - PO Box,Address 1 - Region,Address 1 - Postal Code,Address 1 -
Country,Address 1 - Extended Address,Organization 1 - Type,Organization 1 - Name,Organization 1 - Yomi Name,Organization 1 -
Title,Organization 1 - Department,Organization 1 - Symbol,Organization 1 - Location,Organization 1 - Job Description,Relation 1 -
Type,Relation 1 - Value,Event 1 - Type,Event 1 - Value,Event 2 - Type,Event 2 - Value
Comcast Support,,,Comcast Support,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,* myContacts,,,,,Main,1 800-934-6489,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Again, if it wraps, everything from NAME to Value is the header line.
2nd line is Comcast Support entry with just a phone #.

If you look at the two headers, they are different. The same fields might be there, but not the same name, or order or whatever. I'd have
to pull them into a spreadsheet to see how they line up. But that's the main problem. Unless a program specifically says it's exporting a
csv for use in Gmail, then it's generic. I did not that gmail exported for Outlook. But on TB. Same with TB, just generic.

So to get the TB addresses into gmail, you'd have to pull the csv (and header line) into a spreadsheet, make it look like gmail's export and
change the header names eetc, and then you might get it to import into gmail.

MIGHT!

Al.

--
Linux Mint Cinnamon 20.0 64bit, Dell Inspiron 5570, Quad Core i7-8550U, 16G Memory

[Kingdaddy]

Sad New conclusion:

The modernddressbok apps I have tried, gmail and earthlink.net
are NOT Compatable (yet?) with .csv.

What I have been doing:
Not necessarily in this order, but a better context for teaching... !

With the Thunderbird address book, the csv,
NO BLANK columns at all.
Still fails, earthlink and google.

Earthlink:
I deleted ALL my address book rows.
....SO I have no address book, but I have sever versions of ".csv" files...
....so I'm protected (giggle)

NOT!

I manually received some emails which of course are now in my address
book. They were put in the correct, respective suspect folders.

Individually, I used the APP's features to add those new received email
address(s)to my earthlink APP's address book.

I tested that I could send an email with them in the new address book.

Now I'm gonna export to csv and see if I can import it back.

! Wrong. There is no link or option to export at all. Thatis expected
by me... because the new APP expects to import from another flavor of
APP...
(csv does not exist yet in the APP;s world??)

However:
When the APP converted my old address book to the new APP address book,
indeed I did have an export link... but that generated csv file fails
the same way on import! ! !

I think I'm done. I have no earlink address book, and that affects three
earthlink accounts; ...but I know how to live with that.

(I have a backup of the whole email earthlink folder as of last Saturday
morning.)

Carl
At this point, I do conclude that "We" have a design defect on the APP
that is nor friendly with csv.

[WaltS48]

I don't think you have a Thunderbird problem.

Address books can be exported in Comma Separated, Tab Delimited, vCard
or LDIF format.

How they can be imported into a web mail account is a question for their
support channels.

Have you tried any of the other formats?

For Google it looks like you can only Import addresses from other web
mail accounts.

--
OS: Ubuntu Linux 18.04LTS - Gnome Desktop
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/get-involved/
https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/

[misar]

The problem is not csv, it is because there is no standard format for
address books. As Big Al explained this makes it necessary to check and
possibly change the names and positions of each field. Often one book
will use fields which have no equivalent in another one.

There are a few TB add-ons which try to automate the process but they
all have to make compromises.

[Big Al]

Without looking at the export from Gmail, I can see from the screen that when I input a contact on my phone I am prompted for several phone
#s and each has a label for the phone#. Thunderbird has no such phone# labels. Thus the exports/imports of the two are going to have an
issue. The first phone# I may think is mobile and #2 is Home. But TB has them otherwise. OOPS!

Al