Computer Literati--help please! I know it's O/T

William> Hi Troops: I have run out of patience with the old William> Netscape, ver. 4.7 e-mail program and have installed William> Microsoft's Outlook. I am wondering if there is a easy William> way to transfer my address book from Netscape to Outlook? William> I can get the so called "wizard" to come up but when I William> click on Netscape as the address book to import it asks William> for the file name. I haven't a clue! Can any one out William> there point me at the file identity of Netscape 4.7's William> address book??

Not easy, but neither is finding Outlook's address book :-) Netscape creates a folder in the Programs menu, IIRC (or is it My Documents, anyway, look in both). Maybe called "{n,N}etscape", or "{m,M}ozilla", not sure. In that, you'll find a number folders corresponding to the users. One may be called "default", any others will be what looks like random sequences of digits and letters (about 10 to 20 long). Most likely you only have one sub-folder. When you go to the subfolder (if you have more than one, you'll just have to do them all), you'll see subfolders named cache, mail, news, and lots of files - These are the configuration files and so on, and you'll also see at least one addressbook file and a bookmarks.html file here which you might need to refer to when you import these respective things into Outlook and some other webbrowser. Now go to the mail subflder, "mail" or "Mail". Inside that you'll find a lot of pairs of files, if you look at the sizes you'll notice one of the pair is big, the other small - ignore that small one because it's just a kind of index file which you don't need. The folders have names such as "draft", and "sent" and so on, and if you made your own subfolders in your inbox or elsewhere, there'll be subfolders there which you need to go into as well and find the pairs of files there.

So now, in Outlook, when you are asked for names, one by one you give the names of the mailbox files in the locations explained above. If you have many mailboxes, this could take some time, and you'll have to do the same thing with the address books, which are in the location mentioned in passing above (numbered).

Hope that helps, Gernot

I don't have NN 4 anymore but the file suffix was '.mab' In Win XP, in my Thunderbird, it is abook.mab, under Documents and Settings, (your computer username), Application Data, Thunderbird, Profiles, (your profile).

In Win 95, it is under the Programs, Netscape.

Have you tried Thunderbird, the latest mail/newsreader from Mozilla? It's what I use.

To transfer your address book to Outlook (not Outlook Express), open the Netscape Address Book window, select File/Export and export it as a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file. In Outlook select File/Import and Export, choose Import from another program or file, then choose the file type Comma Separated Values(Windows).

The address book files are "*.mab" files located in your profile directory, in the *.slt folder. The primary address book will be abook.mab

Fire up Netscape and "export" the address book, that works best. (Then, of course, you import it into LookOut!)

FWIW - it's "abook.mab" in Moz. Pretty sure that's what it was called back in the old Netscape days, but where it is on your disk is OS dependent.

Cheers, Gary B-)

If you liked Netscape at one time, try downloading Mozilla's Thunderbird, which is based on Netscape, but is a new up-to-date program.

You should either upgrade to NS 7.2, or go with straight Mozilla. 4.7 is a dead horse...

And I HATE Outlook. The latest version they "upgraded" us to at work is even worse than the previous.

Hi Bill; I have to agree with the guys here. You don't want Outlook or Outlook Express if you don't have to. There are better aps out there. Good luck.

---Stephen

Friends don't let friends use the Bill Gates Personal Virus Transporter. There are many good alternatives available for free. Try Pegasus, Pine or Eudora, all available for free download, or as already mentioned try Thunderbird. Any of those will give you e-mail service far more securely than LookOut!

microshaft is NOT your friend.