How to Import a Hotmail Address Book into a Non-Hotmail Identity in OE6?

Couldn't find this on the bbs anywhere. If there already, please point me.

Using OE 6 on Win98SE. Been using only Hotmail up unti now, with the Hotmail interface - not Outlook Express. Recent signup with Road Runner forced me to finally look at OE. I was able to neatly syncronize my Hotmail address book with my Hotmail Identity in OE6. What I want to do now is syncronize or import that same address book into my Road Runner Identities and then keep all address books syncronized among most Identities.

An attempt to do that by changing the setting in Address Book/Tools/Options/Data Sharing by checking "Share content information among Microsoft Outlook and other applications. Address book data will be stored in the Microsoft Outlook Contact Store " only resulted in all my address book info disapearing and generation of error messages on launch of OE6 ( "The file C\PROGRAM FILES\COMMON FILES\SYSTEM\MAPI\1033\95\outlook could not be found and "Unable to open the Address Book. The address book may not be installed properly ").

I've got everything back to where it was (Hotmail addresses in Hotmail Identity) but still want to copy those into my Road Runner Identities. Can anyone guide me? Thanks.

 

Not sure if this'll work, but try setting up the Hotmail identity within OE, synchronizing with the Hotmail account, exporting the Address Book from that identity and finally importing it into the RoadRunner identity.

 

Brett,

Thanks! It worked flawlessly.

 

Splendid and thanks for posting back

 

Hmmmm.

Well not quite as splendidly as I originally thought.

It seems when you export the contacts from OE6, the .WAB file created contains not just the contents from that identity, but also all the contacts from all identities on that particular installation of OE6. Therefore, when you import them, it imports everything from every identity and puts them in a single folder. Therefore, if you are trying to keep your contacts segregated from the other users of the computer - it does not work. It mixes them all together.

The work around that solved the problem was to export the address book from the hotmail identity to the desktop. Open it from there. Delete all the contact information from the identities you are not importing (they’re all there…I don’t know why) and then do the import into the identity you are trying to set up.

Somehow, this also correctly updates the .WAB file in Windows/application data/Microsoft/address book folder. Trying to edit it from that location directly did not fix the problem. I'm not sure what OE6 is looking at to get address info.

Thanks. You put me on the right track "“ Microsoft just does not make it easy. I see from replies to my other post, problems importing into Outlook exist as well.

 

Exporting the Address Book (on my setup) results in the export of only those contacts belonging to the identity under which the export occurred. Did you have the contacts listed in the Shared Contacts folder rather than listed in the folder belonging to each identity?

This is from Uncle Bill:

When you initially selected the option "Share content information among Microsoft Outlook and other applications" what you in effect did was to instruct OE to use (or share) Outlook's Contacts folder rather than using the WAB (and I'm guessing that you received the error message because Outlook is not installed). What you should have done was to place those contacts which you wished to be shared into the Shared Contacts folder and the other contacts into the folders belonging to the relevant identities.

The workings of the WAB are explained in more detail here.

HTH.