My wife recently moved from Windows to Mac. For her work she has quite a few address lists, none of which made it over. Even though I’m a long time Mac user, I don’t use address lists, so I have no experience with it myself.
This should be as easy as:
Find an old email message in Sent
Select all To addresses and copy them
Go to Contacts and create a new list.
Paste all addresses into the list.
Instead, based on my deep research, AKA googling, it looks like we have to click on each address and add it to Contacts. Then create a list in Contacts and add individually each of the addresses we just added to Contacts to that address list.
Which gets old very quickly if you have more than a dozen addresses to add.
If you have the individual contacts in Contacts, just create a group and drag the relevant contacts into the new group. Shouldn’t have to type in the email addresses
Of course I can do that but the point is, she’s starting from scratch, so her Contacts is empty. So every address first has to be added to the contact book, which is a lookout
Sounded like a good idea. And it took me in the end to a reasonable place but with some detours.
Just a bit of background: An address list on the Mac apparently can only contain contacts for which there’s an actual contact card in Contacts. In Outlook, you can create a contact list and simply paste email addresses in it, without creating contact cards for each of them. Which is what my wife had done. She’s a teacher, parents and students change all the time. She didn’t want to pollute her address book with entries that were only temporarily useful, but needed contact lists for them for the current school year. So the way Outlook works was perfect for her.
As we don’t have a Windows PC anymore, I was only able to access her email account in Outlook on the Web. Turns out, yes, I can export contacts as a csv file—but not contact lists Maybe that’s different for the Outlook app. (I guess I could have installed Mac Outlook but didn’t think of it)
But the csv idea got me thinking. So next, I took one of her messages, copied the whole list of recipients, pasted it into Excel, and saved it as a csv file. Well, Contacts didn’t like it, complained that it wasn’t a csv file. Looked pretty good to me in TextEdit, though. I guess what it really meant was a csv file formatted the way it expects.
After some try-and-error I ended up with a file with an apparent arbitrary number of commas behind every email address but one that Contacts suddenly liked. I can now create a new list in Mac Contacts, select it, choose Import, and it will import those names from the CSV file into the list.
Not quite what we were hoping for as it also creates a Contact card for each of them (which she really doesn’t need) but at least she’s back in business.
Glad things worked out. Would you like to try to get closer to what she wants? If so:
First make a backup, or two. File/Export/Contacts Archive. Then, if you are a belt & suspenders guy, select all the contacts, and click File/Export/Export vCard. That will make a vCard containing all her contacts. Put these backups in a safe place
At this point you can create an export of just the contacts that she doesn’t want in her Contacts full time.
Command + Click on each “temporarily useful” contact and once you have all of them selected you can create a single vCard (File/Export/vCard) of just these temporary contacts. At this point you can delete them, and import them later if/when needed.
However, she will need to recreate her list if they are deleted and reimported so they will need to remain in her Contacts in order to use the list.
A vCard is plain text so you can view them in TextEdit/BBEdit, etc if you want to “proof” your export.
BTW, a contacts archive (.abbu file) overwrites your existing contact list. Not add to it.
Maybe that’s different for the Outlook app. (I guess I could have installed Mac Outlook but didn’t think of it)