Exporting Evolution Contacts to Thunderbird

Posted by ryan
at 3:19 AM on Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Here’s a quick howto on a process that doesn’t seem to be very well supported or documented: Getting your contacts and addresses out of Novell Evolution and into Mozilla Thunderbird (or any other similar mail client like Yahoo Mail etc…)

Exporting from Evolution is not something that’s very apparent. Unless you want to export your contacts as a VCard (by highlighting all and doing a save as vcard) you’re going to have to call upon the obscure evolution-addressbook-export command. For some reason this utility wasn’t in my path, so I had to call it directly.

On Debian Sarge, the basic sequence goes like this:

  1. Export the evolution address book with the evolution-addressbook-export utility in csv format
  2. Import it into Mozilla Thunderbird
  3. Export as needed in other formats to other mail clients (LDIF seems to work well for Yahoo! Mail…)

It’s really simple once you know what to use and where to find it:


/usr/lib/evolution/2.X/evolution-addressbook-export --format=csv > contacts.csv

Now just import it into Mozilla Thunderbird (Addressbook – Tools – Import).

I don’t know why it’s hard to find references to Evolution’s addressbook export utility – it seems to address a pretty big need. Hope this helps somebody…

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  1. Avi Dardik – May 18, 2006 @ 04:42 AM
    Hi - Great great info! I've been looking for a solution for quite a while and I haven't encountered the one you've posted anywhere so far. The solution you have provided is the easiest, most elegant and obviously the easiest one that exists and amazingly no one seems to have known about it. And it worked like a charm too! :-) Thanks!
  2. Ryan Daigle – May 18, 2006 @ 04:42 AM
    No problem, Avi. I don't know why this solution isn't more visible - maybe this will be a start.
  3. Charles McCreary – July 07, 2006 @ 03:15 AM
    If you have multiple folders, it isn't obvious from --help what to do. After fiddling around, I use the -l switch to list the folders: "file:///home/mccreary/.evolution/addressbook/local/system","Personal",2 "file:///home/mccreary/.evolution/addressbook/local/1153080689.7459.0@ubuntu-laptop","Freedom89",21 I then cut and paste the internal evolution folder descriptor as the first argument.
  4. Jules – July 28, 2006 @ 05:16 PM
    Thanks Ryan - an important fix It helped me with the dreaded "Error Adding Contact" in Evolution 2.6.1. (I much prefer Evolution to Thunderbird - I like the cal and task integration) Fix: Use /usr/lib/evolution/2.X/evolution-addressbook-clean > contacts.vcf (which strips your system address book) Then use the Evoution contacts FILE-IMPORT menu to re-import the vcard info back into your [PERSONAL] system adressbook. Worked a charm - but, as you say Ryan, these utilities are not widely known. Cheers Jules
  5. Emma – August 19, 2006 @ 08:31 AM
    Thank-you it helped me! Maybe they realized that evolution sucks so much that they want to make it difficult to get out of using it.
  6. eric – October 18, 2006 @ 05:07 AM
    Fair enough, but once you have a cvs file, it's quite a mess to get the fields ordered correctly. actually it wasn't possible to do it correctly, cause there is one field more on one side. the thunderbird userinterface to order fields is rather crapy too. do we really need to have a local LDAP running on the notebook?