Friday, 11 August 2017

Fix for format problem importing contacts from Yahoo into Outlook via CSV format

After some unpleasantness with Yahoo mail blocking mail to friends addressed in the BCC field by mistakenly labelling my mail as spam, causing me to have to change the password, I decided to phase out my Yahoo mail account and use Outlook instead for sending out tidbits of interest. So I needed to export my contacts from Yahoo to Outlook.

I followed instructions found on the Internet for transferring contacts Yahoo to Outlook, but Outlook kept saying that the imported CSV file was not in the required format.

So I decided to look at a contact export file from Outlook to see what the difference might be. The first thing I noticed was that it had the Byte Order Mark, U+FEFF, at the beginning.

So I processed the CSV file with this Linux pipeline, the unix2dos is to change NL to CR-NL for good measure:

unix2dos < yahoo_contacts.csv | uconv -f ascii -t utf-8 --add-signature > y.csv

uconv is from the ICU package. After that I imported y.csv with no problems. Success!

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