User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird version 0.9 (20041103) [Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0] For some of the contacts in my Outlook Express address book, I have personal information stored that is important to me. Namely, I can enter in a contact's birthday, spouse (e.g. another contact), anniversary, children (e.g. other contacts), and more than two email addresses. I realize there are Custom Fields in the Thunderbird address book, but I hesitate to transfer my information to a format where the data is not semantically related to its containing field. Also, there is no automated way to transfer this information from Outlook Express's address book to Thunderbird's address book. It seems like this shouldn't be such an especially hard feature to implement, and is essentially the only reason I'm not using Thunderbird at this point. I really think this issue should be resolved before the 1.0 release. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Download Thunderbird installer. 2. Install Thunderbird and choose to import Outlook Express's address book. 3. Notice that address book entries do not contain birthdays, anniversaries, etc. Actual Results: I delayed my transfer of all my email to Thunderbird, until it can store everything in a standard way. Expected Results: Read the .wab file fully, included the additional information in the Thunderbird address book. Thunderbird version 0.9 (20041103). I did not see a similar request in Bugzilla.

I completely agree that this is a needed feature, and it is also stopping me from migration, as I use heavily my contact book information at work, I can not afford loosing information because of non-existant field in Thunderbird. Regarding this, I also submitted as enhancements proposals: - support protecting all Thunderbird user info (local mail folders, address books) with a password, like the one we can use to protect the .pst file in Outlook - support rich text formatting in the "Notes" field of the contacts in the address book, and if possible also support file attachments in this same field, again as outlook does. Thunderbird guys have done an amazing progress, and I hope they keep progressing this fast so we can soon forget break our ties to Microsoft and forget about outlook! Regards, Ariel Montreal, Canada

Thunderbird does not import all Outlook Express shared address book addresses including info, it imports only WAB file, which is only used when the Address Book option selected is "Do not share information with MS Outlook etc.." I have maybe 400 adresses and TB only imports about 50 - all stored in WAB files. This is a major flaw. I know of no other way to get the address book saved, transfered or back-up. No way to break away from Microsoft?

I agree both with the original Reporter and with Tony: 1. I had to manually move data such as birthdays, spouse names, children's birthdays and so on. 2. I had to manually move address from my other non-WAB Outlook express address books to Thunderbird. 3. Both actions were tedious and annoying, so I can totally understand people who will not migrate due to these.

see also bug 99938

*** Bug 332366 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Also TB/AB export is writing items like "spouseName" or "Category" to the LDIF file , the import LDIF ignores those elements! This limits users willing to change from Outlook to TB and makes backup processes irrelevant using LDIF Import/Export. Why using LDIF import/export?? It's the only way to get multi-line data for the "Description" / Notes field imported completely!

morphing to meta bug about fields missing in thunderbird and function that blocks effective import. xref meta bug 423488 (perhaps this bug should be made to block it). I've included bug 204070 - but it may be a duplicate.

Should https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119459 added as dependency to this bug?

testers have been complaining about this since 2004. As the problem clearly prevent people form using Thunderbird or its address book is it not ime that it wast fixed! There ere other problems with importing into the address book which are linked and should by now be dealt with. Sorry to be so critical. Perhaps your programmers are too busy.

Hello! I have tested it today with "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091204 Lightning/1.0b1 Thunderbird/3.0" The following fields are ignored from the WAB file: - second forename - title (mr, mrs, ...) - second, third, ... mail addresses - office (location, "room 20, stage 2") - office phone number - office fax - office pager - office IP-phone - partner - children - birthday - anniversary - gender The following fields should be added: - P.O. Box (private and office) - P.O. Box ZIP/postal code (private and office) Please fix this in the next 3 month. Thx

Wow, it seems that these address book problems with OE have been going on for YEARS!! Anyway: MY problem is that I recently installed Win7Pro(64bit). I used PCmover to get over some of my stuff from WinXP_Pro_sp3(32bit). I installed Thunderbird v.3.0.2 and it successfully imported all my mail folders and mail and accounts and settings, BUT not my address book. When I try Tools|Import|Address Books|Next|Outlook Express|Next, I get "No address books were found to import." beneath "Addresses successfully imported from Outlook Express." !!! No addresses were actually imported, and I can find no way to force T-bird to do so, nor is there an option to "Browse..." to show T-bird where the '.wab' file is! VERY FRUSTRATING!

this problem is not fixed yet and it's f***ing annoying

Hello, I understand that not all fields can be imported because the database of Outlook has more fields than the TB address book. But it would be very helpful to enhance the import at least for some fields: - birthday - custom fields 1-4 (or "Various / User-defined", don't know their name in the english version of Outlook) Would you do this? That the import from Outlook only works when you (temporarily) make Outlook the default e-mail client on Windows is mentioned here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=297533

I tried to circumvent the difficulties with Outlook import with the step of a CSV file but discovered other problems there: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194095

To assist Thunderbird work without breaking when synchronizing with the iPhone, would Thunderbird be designed and enabled to store: 1. multiple phone numbers of the same type (unlike Outlook which has: Business, Business 2, Home, Home 2)? 2. multiple addresses of the same type (home, business, other)? Thank you