I was lucky enough to have to deal with a somewhat vexing problem this week that once again, in lieu of a computer utility, here’s a story about battling the ISP that every loves to hate, AOL…
I had the opportunity to find a way to export several thousand contacts from an AOL account. For just about any other email system, this would be as trivial as clicking on the “Export” button. However, AOL, because it is evil and wants to lock you in to their evilness, doesn’t have an “Export” button. You can’t export contacts from your AOL email account with a simple click. Since nobody felt like manually typing in several thousand addresses, a solution had to be found.
Much like last week, Googling around for an answer turned up little that was helpful. AOL Communicator? Doesn’t exist anymore. Using a site called Plaxo.com? It grabbed a couple hundred addresses somehow, but that’s it. Try to print them out, and instead just copy the text? Well, that kinda worked, but it was in a poor format that wasn’t terribly useful. The closest I came was using something called Funambol, which could sync Outlook and AOL. Unfortunately, it didn’t pan out, and not just because I had to install the hated Outlook. No, it would crash after getting around 800 contacts; more than enough for most address books, but far short of what I needed here.
Then a funny thing happened. I was playing around with Gmail for an entirely unrelated reason, when I noticed something in the Settings: Import other email and contacts. Really? Could Gmail import AOL contacts when nobody else could? It turns out yes, Gmail can. They don’t promise fast results (it can take over 24 hours for the import to even start, they warn), but these warnings were wildly pessimistic and just a couple hours later I had them all in a Gmail account.
So thanks again, Google. Try getting the word out about this to the internet though! And AOL, please die.