OL2000: How to Prepare Your Pine Address Book for Import into Outlook (229731)


The information in this article applies to:

  • Microsoft Outlook 2000
This article was previously published under Q229731
WARNING:This information is preliminary and has not been confirmed or tested by Microsoft. Use only with discretion.

SUMMARY

This article describes how to reformat your Pine address book so you can successfully import it into Outlook.

MORE INFORMATION

Pine holds its address book in a file named, addrbook. This file is unassociated in Windows, because it has no file extension and is proprietary to the Pine program. The addrbook file is tab-delimited and uses a special character as a record delimiter. The character used is a non-ASCII character not recognized by the Outlook converter, and will cause an error message if imported. When you open the file in a text editor such as Notepad, the entry delimiter is represented as a black block.

NOTE: This is a common way that Unix-based text files signify carriage returns. Windows programs do not recognize this character as a carriage return. When opened in Microsoft Word, the black box character is correctly converted to an end of paragraph character.

Pine was not originally developed as a Windows program. It was ported to Windows from the original Unix code base. In order to migrate the addrbook file, you need to replace the black box characters with carriage returns. You can then import the Pine file into Outlook.

To prepare the Pine address book for importing into Outlook, follow these steps:
  1. Open the addrbook file in Word. To see the file, you will need to select All files from the Files of type list.
  2. On the toolbar, click Show/Hide. You should see arrows pointing to the right indicating a tab character, and paragraph marks (backwards P) indicating the end of each contact record.
  3. The very last record contains the Header information needed to map the fields. Look to see if there is a paragraph mark between the email address and fcc field. If there is, remove it.
  4. Click to select the last row, the header information, and then cut and paste it to the top of the document. It must be the first row in the document.
  5. On the File menu, click Save as, give the file a name, and change the Save as type to Text Only (*.txt). Click Save. The file is now ready to import into Outlook.
Pine has five fields, nickname, full name, email address, fcc field, and comment. You can map these as appropriate, depending on the information you have in each field.

REFERENCES

For more information on Pine, please connect to their Web site at the following address:

http://www.washington.edu/pine/

The third-party products that are discussed in this article are manufactured by companies that are independent of Microsoft. Microsoft makes no warranty, implied or otherwise, regarding the performance or reliability of these products.
Modification Type:MajorLast Reviewed:9/29/2003
Keywords:kbhowto kbinfo KB229731
©2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.