Uploading Outlook Express Adresses to Fastmail
 

Hi,

Just tried to upload a .csv file with my addresses to my fastmail account. This did not work.

Now, I'm not sure, but could the reason be that the .csv file entries will be in Italian, whereas Fastmail will process them in English?

Any ideas? Seemed such a simple thing to do.....

Thanks,

AlexR

Why didn't it work? What was the error?

Did you choose Outlook Express Exported CSV as data format?

Can you import an English-only CSV file, to see if that fixes the problem?

The error was this:

No addresses were found in the file/text uploaded

"Did you choose Outlook Express Exported CSV as data format?" -Yes, I did

"Can you import an English-only CSV file, to see if that fixes the problem?"

No - cannot do this my OS (XPhome) is all in Italian

I'll try the export process again.

Tried once again - but got same error message.

the CSV is valid, nonempty, just FM doesn't recognize it?

why should Italian be the problem? does it use any special characters/encoding? (There are known issues with address book and non-English characters)

You can also try the comma-delimited, if you're willing to rearrange the columns

I don't understand why that happens

Looked at the csv file and the heading info at the top is in Italian - maybe this is the problem.

I'll change the info to English and try again.

I don't think Italian uses any special characters, apart from a few accents, which I don't think any of my addresses have.

When I joined FM, I was already generating Yahoo-formatted .CSV files for export to Yahoo. FM accepts a number of formats, including Yahoo's. Yahoo itself is understands several formats, including, I believe, OE-formatted .CSVs.

So, if you have a Yahoo account handy, a possible workaround might be to have Yahoo import your OE-.CSV file and re-export a Yahoo-.CSV file, and see if FM likes that one better. Not the most direct route, but
if you don't have to do it routinely, it may get you there.

-jeff-

This is the message I got, when I had a go at Jeff's clever workaround.

"47 of the 47 contacts in the file could not be imported due to one or more of the following errors: non-unique nickname, blank contact, incorrect contact format, missing required field values, exceeded max number of contacts."

The message is self-explanatory:o , apart from the 'incorrect contact format', which I'm not sure I understand. I did think I had all the required info.....

I'll correct the obvious errors and have a go at uploading the thing again.

Thanx for the input.

I have just updated my addresses from OE. The English file should look like the following. Make sure you have just these fields. You can copy the header line straight accross.

Great:) That's done it!

I opened the csv file (notebook) and pasted the English -

Name,Nickname,E-mail Address,Home Phone,Personal Web Page,Business Phone

over the Italian equivalent - making sure the Italian csv file contained the right info.

One other thing I did was replace all the ";"s with ","s.

Many thanks David.

Alex

Glad to be of assistance. Perhaps you could copy the first few lines of your Italian file here (with personal information hidden) so that the FM people can look at improving the Import process.

you can completely hide all personal information - leave only the first line :), and what are the differences from an English CSV (comma-semicolon, any accents, and the header line).

However, I don't think supporting international users is on top of the to-do list right now

OK, here is the header info from my Italian csv file

Nome;Alternativo;Posta elettronica;Telefono (ab.);Pagina Web personale;Telefono (uff.)

The order is the same as for the English headers.

Thanks again guys,

If FM want to use this info, they are welcome to - maybe the Help info could be changed to reflect my litte problem.

A