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I'm experiencing a very strange error with regards to importing contacts that were exported from the Postbox 3 address book.

The CSV file itself is fine - everything maps out nicely in Excel, but Outlook cannot read it. Well, it does read it, but shows the output as per the screens below.

Using Sublime Text, I have tried saving in every encoding format available, from ANSI to UTF-8, but still no luck. Have also tried re-saving the CSV file using Excel.

Here's a screenshot of the problem I'm facing:

contact import bug?

What's interesting, is every time I save it, the results differ. Sometimes it shows Chinese/Japanese characters, and other times it shows only half the email address. If I navigate through the records using the Previous and Next buttons, it starts merging the second half of the first email address in the list somewhere within the second and nth addresses thereafter.

contact import bug?1

I'm using Outlook 2013 and Postbox 3.0.8.

Does anybody have an idea of what could be going on, and how I can fix this?

Update - 10 Sept. 2014

Per Raystafarian's suggestion, I tried saving the file as a CSV in MS-DOS format, but no luck. Initially, the file was saving with semi-colons instead of commas, so I changed my Region settings to use commas instead. But that just takes me back to square-one, albeit with no Chinese/Japanese gibberish:

contact import bug?2

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  • Why are you using sublime text? Excel is a .csv, which is what outlook is looking for, right? Sep 9, 2014 at 11:38
  • Excel is not a CSV. CSV is a file format. My suspicion was that Postbox used the incorrect encoding to save the file, which Outlook could not read correctly. So I used Sublime Text to change the encoding, to see if that was the problem - it seems not to be the case. Sep 9, 2014 at 11:49
  • excel files can be saved as .csv, not sure why you would need to change the encoding.. What file format is postbox exporting? Sep 9, 2014 at 11:52
  • Just for the hell of it, did you try opening the CSV in excel, copy and paste everything into a new workbook, then resave the CSV in excel. It might be that Excel is detecting that CSV is unicode, so it saves it again as unicode, but copying and pasting to a new workbook will insure that Excel is saving it as boring old ASCII when you Save As csv. Also, Outlook is terrible, so that might be the problem too. Lastly, is this all being done on the same computer, or are you taking the file from Mac to Windows?
    – JNevill
    Sep 9, 2014 at 12:40
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    Have you tried creating a dummy file (from scratch) in excel and seeing if that imports to outlook? Perhaps outlook is having the issue Sep 9, 2014 at 13:55

1 Answer 1

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Right, so I figured it out. First of all, I must say that I was quite silly to skip the final import - only relying on the preview in the Mapping wizard.

Turns out the import works, but the mapping previews get all distorted. I assume that's some kind of component problem - an Outlook bug (which wouldn't surprise me).

Note, though, that I had to split the CSV file up into smaller chunks, because it was too large. Processing 5000 entries at once threw a MAPI error at about half way. So, to be safe, I split the file up into chunks with 500 each.

Update

Turns out that the MAPI error was because of a malformed/non-existent email address in the list. Found it, remove it, and all went fine.

Thanks for all the help/.

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  • Yeah I got all sorts of errors just trying to sync gmail contacts with outlook contacts; outlook is really funky with its fields. Sep 10, 2014 at 11:14
  • It's quite weird. But at least I know it works. :-) Sep 10, 2014 at 12:54

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