Ever since April 1, 2004, when Google introduced its brand-new email service, gMail has been among the most popular web-based mail gateways, along with Yahoo and Hotmail. One of the issues many people face when switching to gMail is not so much getting used to the new interface, but having to reconstruct their old address books. I know people who have used the same email program, on the same computer, for years and years. Those type of people generally have a very extensive address book.
To manually have to type all those names and email addresses all over again, just to start using gMail, is a daunting prospect, and I believe it’s one of the reasons that even more people don’t switch.
With a tiny program called gMailContacts, however, that problem is no longer a hindrance.
Available for free (for basic features) or for a mere five dollars (for a few extras), gMailContacts is a fantastic utility (available here), that makes converting your Apple Address Book to your gMail account in one single step.
After you’ve downloaded gMailContacts, simply open it up. You’ll see a very basic window, asking you for your gMail address and password. Once you’ve entered that information, you’ll need to decide exactly which email addresses you want gMailContacts to transfer to your gMail address book.
The Apple Address Book allows you to create groups of users, which can be very helpful when sending out mass emails. Since the Apple Address Book is available to all programs on the computer, gMailContacts is able to parse those groups and display them. You can choose to transfer only a certain group, or simply select All. You’re now ready to make the exchange!
Hit the Upload button. That’s it! You’ll see a progress bar appear on the top of the gMailContacts window for a bit, and at the end, a simple drop-down menu will appear, informing you of how many contacts have been uploaded to your gMail account.
If you want more features (everything I just mentioned was available for free), it will cost you five dollars. What that five dollars gets you is a little more of your Address Book (besides just names and primary email addresses), uploaded to gMail. With the upgraded version, you’ll also be able to transfer your contacts’ postal addresses and phone numbers to the gMail address book.
In my mind, this is a great utility. Apple’s Address Book is able to convert your contacts to the standard vCard format, but offers no option to export to CSV format (comma separated values), which is the only format gMail is able to import. I believe there are online services which will convert from one to the other, but with those types of conversions it’s always a risk that something won’t convert quite correctly, or else you’ll end up with gMail accounts filled with completely empty fields.
So in my book, if you’ve been using Apple’s Address Book to store your contacts, and you’ve now switched (or are thinking of switching) to gMail, why not give gMailContacts a try? It’s free, and it just works!
