Thunderbird won't import contacts (SOLVED)

[KNHVT]

Hello,
I'm a newbie to Linux - one year in, no coding background, etc. Overall, things are going very well, and the help I've gotten here a few times has been key.

I use Protonmail, and after a year of on-and-off back and forth with them, I finally have the bridge working with Thunderbird.

At any rate, I have been trying to import my contacts from the Protonmail webmail to Thunderbird. There is an export tool on the webmail site, and that seems to go fine - it creates a .vcf file. If I open that document, it has all of my contacts there. Then I open Thunderbird and use the import tool - that appears to go fine, but after I hit "finish" and look in the contacts, there are no addresses. I have shut down and rebooted, closed Thunderbird and re-opened it, tried all of this several times, but nothing changes.

I searched on here for threads on this and found things from 2015 saying that a .vcf file is for individual addresses only, but I'm thinking that must have changed? It is the only export option.

Can anyone help? I have TB 102, and I am on Cinnamon - Kernel: 5.15.0-67-generic x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 11.3.0 Desktop: Cinnamon 5.6.8 tk: GTK 3.24.33 wm: muffin dm: LightDM Distro: Linux Mint 21.1 Vera base: Ubuntu 22.04 jammy

Thank you.

[BillyLinux]

TBH not as familiar as I wish on either mail clients, but is CSV file format an option to export and import?

[coffee412]

First copy your original download to another file. We will work off the copy of the original instead.

Go into thunderbird / Address book and create two addresses in there. Now, Export the address book. Choose comma seperated. Open it up and notice a few things:
1. The layout of the address book data is separated by commas. If there is no data for one part then its left blank but you need double commas to tell thunderbird that. Like below:

james,james smith,jsmith@somewhere.com
or
james,,jsmith@somewhere.com

Now open up your copy of the exported address book in an editor (xed) and change the format to reflect thunderbirds. Then when done save it as a third file called something like fixed-addressbook.csv then try importing it to thunderbird.

EDIT: If you have a lot of addresses then open the csv file in libreOffice calc and its going to be worlds easier to fix things.

[KNHVT]

TBH not as familiar as I wish on either mail clients, but is CSV file format an option to export and import?

Thank you for the reply. Unfortunately, no, there is no choice, it's just "export."

[KNHVT]

First copy your original download to another file. We will work off the copy of the original instead.

Go into thunderbird / Address book and create two addresses in there. Now, Export the address book. Choose comma seperated. Open it up and notice a few things:
1. The layout of the address book data is separated by commas. If there is no data for one part then its left blank but you need double commas to tell thunderbird that. Like below:

james,james smith,jsmith@somewhere.com
or
james,,jsmith@somewhere.com

Now open up your copy of the exported address book in an editor (xed) and change the format to reflect thunderbirds. Then when done save it as a third file called something like fixed-addressbook.csv then try importing it to thunderbird.

EDIT: If you have a lot of addresses then open the csv file in libreOffice calc and its going to be worlds easier to fix things.

Thanks for this. I'll try it today and report back.

[KNHVT]

Protonmail has tested on their end and opened a bug report with their team - after telling me twice that they could export contacts with no problem, they finally read my emails and got it that I could do that too - but Thunderbird couldn't import them. They tested with Thunderbird and discovered that the Protonmail export has a bug. So I can hope it gets fixed soon.

Thanks to everyone here who helped me with this.

[KNHVT]

I'm trying to see how to close this - ?

[BillyLinux]

I'm trying to see how to close this - ?

All you do is edit your first post and amend the title of the post by adding [SOLVED] at the end and saving.

[Joe2Shoe]

Thunderbird - Export/Import Accounts-Messages-Address Books-Profiles-Settings

EXPORT:
1. Open Thunderbird.
2. Top-Right, left-click on the 3 bars.
3. Select "Tools".
4. Select "Export".
5. You have the choice of Exporting all of the above or "Open profile folder".
6. Click "Export".
7. Save to Downloads or default location.
8. Click "Save".
9. Data will be saved in a ZIP file.

IMPORT:
1. Open Thunderbird.
2. Top-Right, left-click on the 3 bars.
3. Select "Tools".
4. Select "Import".
5. Select "Import from a file".
6. Click "Continue".
7. Select "Import Backed-up Profile.
8. Click "Continue".
9. Select "Choose an Exported ZIP file.
10. Click "Continue".
11. Open Exported ZIP file location.
12. Click Open.
13. Confirm Import of data.
14. Thunderbird will need to be restarted when importing is complete.

OPEN PROFILE FOLDER:
1. Open Thunderbird.
2. Top-Right, left-click on the 3 bars.
3. Select "Tools".
4. Select "Export".
5. Select "Open profile folder".

PROFILE FOLDER LOCATION:
/home/user/.thunderbird/xxxxxxxxxx.default
or
/home/user/.thunderbird/xxxxxxxxxx.default-release

[KNHVT]

Thanks, but none of that worked. I figured it out with Protonmail, as I stated above