A Quick Guide to Export Contacts from Thunderbird to Gmail Account

Mozilla Thunderbird and Gmail both are the popular free email clients which are used by the user over many years. Thunderbird is a desktop-based application while Gmail is a webmail email program. Being an internet-based, Gmail provides access to data from anywhere if you have an internet connection. Due to this feature, many Thunderbird users transfer their mailbox data into Gmail account. However, the most important folder in every account after Inbox is Address Book. And, many users face difficulty while exporting contacts from Thunderbird mail to Gmail account. Hence, this write-up will cover this situation and provides a variety of solutions to achieve export contacts from Thunderbird to Gmail. Let’s start with a user scenario to understand the situation in a brief manner.

“My company uses Mozilla Thunderbird as their professional email application. However, due to some problem we currently shifted to Gmail. Now, the problem is, I am working in customer service and I handle lots of clients in a day. So, the address book is really important for me to send emails to the customers. But I do not know how to export emails from Mozilla Thunderbird to Gmail. Can anyone suggest me a method for the same?”

As the users can clearly see the importance of contacts. Now, further explore the different methods to move Emails from Thunderbird email client to Gmail profile.

Simple Methods to Export Address Book From Thunderbird to Gmail

Here, two workarounds are mentioned for different situations. Using these solutions, one can easily move Mozilla Thunderbird contacts in user Gmail profile. So, Let’ get started with the techniques:

Scenario #1: Use Thunderbird to Move or Export Contacts from Thunderbird to Gmail Account

In this manual method, the address book is importing into Gmail with the help of Mozilla Thunderbird program. Now, go through the below instructions to use this workaround:

1. Open Mozilla Thunderbird application on the system.
2. Now, click on the Address Book option.
3. A new dialog box named as Address Book will pop-up on the screen. If you want to export all the contacts, including Personal as well as Collected Address Book, then select All Address Book.
4. Go to the Tools tab and select Export option from the list.
5. Now, select an appropriate location and provide a suitable name for the contacts file. Also, choose the format of a file as CSV and click on Save button.
6. After that, open your Gmail account in the browser.
7. Next, click on Mail drop-down button and select Contacts option.
8. A new Google Contacts window tab open the screen.
9. Click on More and choose the Import contact option.
10. A new dialog box will display and asking for uploading the CSV file. Now, you need to click on Browse button and select the currently created .csv file.
11. After selecting the file, click on Import to begin the actual process to export Mozilla Thunderbird emails to Gmail.
12. Once the process gets successfully completed, you can view your Thunderbird contacts into Gmail contacts.

Scenario #2: Export Contacts from Thunderbird to Gmail Without Using Thunderbird Client

• There are many situations where users do not have an installation of Thunderbird application. But they have the mailbox data file. In such cases, users can go with the MAB Converter software.
• It is an automated software that successfully converts Thunderbird Contacts into CSV format without using associated email client. Moreover, it can export address book in 2+ file formats, including CSV.
• Above all, if the user has several MAB files, then it can also be converts into the desired file formats. Hence, below the series of instructions is mentioned that required to accomplish the task.

Steps to Convert Thunderbird Contacts into CSV Using Software

1. Initially, open the software on the Windows system.
2. Now, click on Add File to browse the Thunderbird address book file i.e., MAB. This file consists of all the contacts entries.
3. From the right-side panel, you can see the folder structure. Adding to it, in a detailed pane, you can select the desired contacts for the conversion.
4. Now, Click on Export to open the Export Options dialog box. Here, you can select the file formats like PST, CSV, vCard.
5. Next, Browse a location for the resultant file. You can also create a new folder for output file by clicking on Make New Folder option.
6. After that, click on Export to actually start the MAB to CSV conversion.

Once the process is completed to export Thunderbird address book to CSV file, then open the Google Account. And go to Google Contacts tab and import the .csv in Gmail contacts.

Final Thoughts

Many Thunderbird users ask the ‘how to export contacts from Thunderbird to Gmail’ question constantly on the forum sites. After considering this problem, in this post, we have discussed the two most appropriate solutions to transfer address book from Mozilla Thunderbird mail to Gmail profile. Moreover, if the users want a fast method among the above-workaround, then they can go for third party solution as discussed above. It is a do-it-yourself software and requires no technical knowledge for exporting contacts from Thunderbird mail to Gmail account.