HowTo: Sync contacts with iMap

With Plaxo being bought by Comcast, people I know are feeling uneasy about trusting their data in Comcast’s hands.
But how many alternatives have we got for syncing? .Mac? Google? There a possibilities, but Plaxo is probably the best in it’s field.

I actually stumbled across a solution by accident – a fit of dragging and dropping in Outlook Express turned out to be viable.

What do we need?

• An iMap account of sorts (GMail?)
• Contacts stored on a computer

1. Get your contacts in a workable format – export them as VCF files. This will take a while if you’ve got a lot, but it’s worth it.
2. Open the VCF file in a text editor. You’ll get something like the following:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
N:Doe
FN:John
NICKNAME:Jonny
EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:john.doe@gmail.com
etc

     3. Copy this into an email. Put the person’s name as the subject, and send it to your iMap account – store all of them in their own folder, maybe using filtering rules.

Now all of your contacts can be searched with your email – you can access them on any client (even the web if it’s a provider like GMail), and if you need to import them into a program, simply copy the body of the message into a text file and change the extension to *.vcf