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Open Source AOL CSV Address Book Export

Ohhh the thrill as a night’s hacking journey reaches its culmination. It all started yesterday…

I was doing some work on my Preacher’s computer and in the process, set up Mozilla Thunderbird to work with his shiny new GFYD email address, which for him and the rest of the Church staff, will be replacing their old dusty AOL addresses. I had Tbird running like a dream. It started in the tray as a notifier, checked and sent as either his old and new addresses, the works. So yesterday evening I went to drop his computer off and proudly showed him how to work Thunderbird.

So he says… “where are my contacts?” My heart sunk, I hadn’t even given that a thought.

After searching online a bit, it seemed that the only way to get your contacts out of AOL into a CSV is a pay program (unacceptable) or to just manually type them out (double unacceptable).

<rant>Companies who prey on unsuspecting customers by doing everything in their power to make switching away from their otherwise worthless service as painful as possible deserve to be stricken with boils and devoured slowly by abnormally large army ants.</rant>

So, out of half love for the people who work at my Church, whose contacts are caught up in the AOL fortress, and half for the rest of the people stuck with AOL’s clownware out there, I took it upon myself to write a python program that takes AOL’s address book and dumps it to a CSV file.

I dub you… ‘AOL is Worthless’ (or AIW for short)

For the geeks, here’s how it works: After you download the print format contact page, AIW splits it into sections for each person. It uses an SGML parser to run through the tags and identify the data. It runs through once and gets a list of all the different contact types for the title row of the CSV file. Then it goes back through again and collects each contact detail and writes it to the appropriate slot in the row and writes the row.

Like it says in the title, this is open source (GPL3). The zip file includes both a standalone EXE (unzip and read the readme) and the single python source file.

If this has been of use to you, all I ask is that you visit this page and read it all the way through: http://www.prairiebaptistchurch.org/Salvation.html

If you have problems, post in comments.

Download AOL is Worthless

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 6:46 am and is filed under Geekiness-Hacker, Geekiness-NotSoMuch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  • kenny

    Thanks a lot for posting this, but I’m having trouble. I followed all of the steps in the readme file, and all seemed well until step 9. I can’t find the contacts.csv file. Where should it be? Where exactly should I have saved the address.html file? I had it saved in the same directory as the exe file. Please help!!! I hate aol with such a passion and I need to be done with them.

    Many thanks,
    Kenny

  • admin

    The exe file (make sure it is AOL_is_worthless.exe, not the other one) will automatically look for address.html in the directory that it is located in. It should also write contacts.csv to that same directory. Try running the exe from the command line, it should spew out some kind of error if something went wrong. Post the error here.

  • kenny

    Hey,

    Thanks for the response. I tried it again but still no csv file, and no error message.

    I tried it then from the command line but got: AOL_is_Worthless is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

    I then sent my address.html file to a friend who tried it. Here’s what came back:

    C:\AOL_is_Worthless>AOL_is_Worthless.exe
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File “AOL_is_Worthless.py”, line 97, in
    File “sgmllib.pyc”, line 99, in feed
    File “sgmllib.pyc”, line 181, in goahead
    File “sgmllib.pyc”, line 407, in handle_charref
    File “AOL_is_Worthless.py”, line 64, in handle_data
    AttributeError: ‘dict’ object has no attribute ‘append’

    What do you think?

  • Bill

    Thank you for posting this, I found it very helpful for moving family members off of AOL.

  • admin

    Bill:

    Glad I could help!

  • Sue

    Hi,

    I cannot get it to work either. I tried the suggestions but still no contacts.csv any other suggestions. I would really love to get my contacts without having to copy and paste or type them all. It’s a great idea I hope we can get it to work.

    Thanks!
    Sue