Moving or Backing Up Your Address Files...

BY: Don Edrington's PC Chat (Computer Tutor Don) (with his permission!!)
If you have questions, remember to send the DATE of the article to www.pcdon.com...

Sunday, Jan. 26, 2003

Backing Up Your Email Address Book

Rock Wattson wrote to ask how to back up an email Address Book.

Well, it varies from one email program to another.

Outlook Express users can go to File, Export, Address Book and click on "Text File (Comma Separated Values)." Next, click the Export button and give the file a name in the "Save Exported File As" box. Click on Browse to choose a location for the file, say, your My Documents folder.

You'll be asked to choose from a list of "fields" (Name, Email, Phone, etc.) which items you want saved. The finished document will have a CSV extension, which can be opened as an Excel file (with each field in a separate column) or as a Notepad file (with commas separating the fields).

In fact, the CSV extension can be changed to TXT, to insure that the document will be read as a "plain text" file. The advantage is that all computers can read TXT files; but not all computers have Excel onboard.

Netscape 7 users can go to Window, Address Book, Tools, Export, where they'll be offered three file types from which to choose. Again, I recommend TXT. "My Documents" will normally be the suggested storage folder.

AOL and CompuServe users have no "Export" options, but can do this: Click on Write. Then click on Mail, Address Book. Next, while holding down the Shift key, click on the first and last names in the Address Book. This will select all names.

Next click the Send To button. This will cause all the "screen names" to appear in the Send To box, with each name separated by a comma. Now click inside the Send To box and do Ctrl+A to "Select All" and then do Ctrl+C to Copy all the screen names. Now you can launch any word processor (including Notepad) and do Ctrl+V to Paste the data into a page.

Lastly, save the page as a TXT file.

Juno users can back up their name list by clicking on Email, Address Book, followed by mouse-selecting all the names and addresses.

Next right-click anywhere in the selection and choose Copy. Finally, do Ctrl+V to Paste the data into any word processor and save the page as a TXT file.

As an alternative to the Export procedure, Outlook Express users can click on Addresses to display all the Names and Email Addresses in their list. The entire list can then be selected by holding down Shift and clicking on the first and last entries. Right-click anywhere in the selection and do Ctrl+C to Copy, and then Ctrl+V to Paste the list somewhere.

"Somewhere," by the way, doesn't have to be a word processing page -- it can be an outgoing email.

This is especially handy if your reason for saving an Address Book is to copy the data onto another computer.

In addition to the Address Book "Export" procedures explained above, Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and Netscape have Import options.

Outlook users can go to File, Import/Export and follow the prompts. In Outlook Express, go to File, Import, Other Address Book and follow the prompts.

Netscape users can go to Window, Address Book, Tools, Import, while Eudora users can go to File, Import. Some of these Import/Export options may be limited by which program "versions" you're using, in which case upgrades can often be downloaded from a program author's Web site.

It pays to investigate. Gary Phillips wrote to say he uses Outlook Express and wants to know if he can send a specific email to everyone in his Address Book, without typing in all the names.

Well, the main purpose of an Address Book is to allow us to point and click names into the "Send To" or "Carbon Copy To" boxes. However, even this procedure can be speeded up in OE, AOL, and CS (CompuServe) by creating a "Group" and then putting all the target names and addresses into the group.

When doing this, however, I only put my own email address in the "Send To" box and then put the entire "Group" into the BCC (blind carbon copy) box. This way each recipient sees only his or her own name on the incoming email, rather than letting dozens of people see dozens of other email addresses.

Please protect your recipients' privacy by always using BCCs.

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