Yay, it’s been a while since my last geek post.
Since I got my Palm Pilot IIIe at a yard sale for $5 last Saturday I was tooling around with trying to get my contact (address book) data that I have in Mozilla Tunderbird into the Palm Desktop application so I can carry around all that info.
I exported the Thunderbird data into a CSV (comma separated values) file and went to do the import into Palm Desktop and all worked OK except that the email address always showed up in a work phone # field. I guess I could have lived with that but it was driving me nuts so I got in touch with customer support which wasn’t very helpful. Newsgroups had no answers. Finally I decided to find some independent Palm discussion forums and there was my answer, yes, there’s a bug in Palm Desktop 4.1.4 that either Palm support folks don’t know about or refuse to admit. Anyway, I found my answers in this discussion thread, basically one can create a .tpa file which tells the application which fields in your cvs file to match up with the predefined Palm fields.
So if anyone out there is trying to to the same thing, I hope this shows up on a search for you and that you’ll find my Thunderbird CSV —> Palm Desktop TPA import file handy
Download it here http://dirtmine.com/volker/geek/thunderbirdTpaFile/thunderb.tpa, to use it just drop it in your Palm Desktop directory. I’ve only tested on Windows. If you have any success on a Mac I’d love a comment, both for me and for others’ benefit.
(update: today i figured out that yahoo address book does the appropriate imports/exports to accomplish this task. Haven’t tested it but it looks like it should work.)
Posted by volker at October 20, 2004 11:59 PMPalm extension for thunderbird:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/extensions/palmsync/
Not that I've got it to work yet...
Posted by: brad at November 9, 2004 11:06 PMwhy this? after it says its installed I get:
Firefox could not download the file at
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/extensions/palmsync/palmsync.xpi
because: Unexpected error -203
I've found the solution. Name the field E-mail. The m is not a capital!!!
Posted by: Ronny Saaman at November 27, 2004 11:59 AMRenaming the field E-mail or E-Mail or E-diggitymail doesn't mean jack. Plam import does not look for a field header while importing it just imports the way it wants to. I can prove to you that it is a bug in the desktop software in the fact that I exported my palm contacts to a CSV (after I created a new contact and echoed the field name as each fields entry) I reorganized the mess that palm exports infomation as so that I had the correct data under the correct field. Then trying to reimport it Every field lined up with each other (even E-Mail linked to the record E-mail) ANd still the damn Email field comes up as a Work field.
If anyone can help on this I would love to here the fix.
Posted by: Wood at April 24, 2005 01:34 PMRenaming the field E-mail or E-Mail or E-diggitymail doesn't mean jack. Palm import does not look for a field header while importing it just imports the way it wants to. I can prove to you that it is a bug in the desktop software in the fact that I exported my palm contacts to a CSV (after I created a new contact and echoed the field name as each fields entry) I reorganized the mess that palm exports infomation as so that I had the correct data under the correct field. Then trying to reimport it Every field lined up with each other (even E-Mail linked to the record E-mail) And still the damn Email field comes up as a Work field.
If anyone can help on this I would love to here the fix.
Been tryingto clean up my database for 3 hrs straight now.