Ways to Import Apple Mail Contacts to Outlook

Contacts present in your email clients are important enough to keep them updated, safe, and move to the newer platform with email and notes. Each contact present in your email management system is the medium to receive information, updates, discounts, and other useful details. Modern email applications like Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Windows Mail, etc. provide special attention towards managing their contacts and allow the creation of multiple address books and contacts lists. A user can create unlimited address books and save contacts based on your special requirements.

The current article will show you how you can import Apple Mail contacts to Outlook. User can also import entire OLM emails to Outlook

Export contacts as VCF file

1. Open your Apple Mail application and go to the contacts category. You can also choose Address Book.
2. As you need to export contacts in vCard, you must choose only contacts for the export process. Apple Mail allows exporting notes and photos also. So, you should go to Contacts and click Preferences. Choose vCard and uncheck the options to ‘export notes in vCards’ and ‘Export photos in vCards.’ It will set your preferences.
3. Click File and choose Export. Then, choose Export vCard and save a vCard with a new name and saving folder. The vCard will be saved in .vcf format.
4. To use the VCF format in Windows Outlook, you should transfer the file from macOS to the Windows platform.

Note – Apple Mail can export vCards in two formats – ABBU and VCF. As Outlook recognizes VCF format and can import its contents. So, you should create a VCF file only.

Import VCF file in Outlook

1. Start Outlook and click the File option.
2. Under the Open & Export section, click Import/Export.
3. Choose the option ‘Import a VCARD file (.vcf)’ and click Next.
4. Browse the VCF file from the location where you had saved it.
5. It will show in a separate section and you can check it into Contacts.

Import Apple Mail Contacts to Outlook using CSV format

Outlook can import files from the CSV format also. So, you can try to export contacts into a CSV file and import a CSV file into Outlook to add them.

1. In Apple Mail, go to Contacts and choose all the contacts that you want to export.
2. Copy the contacts.
3. Open an MS Excel file and paste the contacts into it. Remove the undesired columns and save the file in a CSV format.
4. Transfer the file from macOS to the Windows platform.
5. Open Outlook and click the File option.
6. In the Open & Export section, click Import/Export.
7. Choose ‘Import from another program or file,’ and click Next.
8. Select the Comma Separated Values option and click Next.
9. Browse the CSV file that you have transferred from macOS and select it to import.
10. After import, you can see that contacts are moved and present in the Contacts category.

Reasons to import Apple Mail Contacts to Outlook

Mac and Windows are two major platforms that help businesses to use applications with the help of their graphical user interface. But, they are incompatible with each other. MS Outlook uses PST format and Outlook for Mac creates OLM format. The interface is different and the features and settings are different too. So, there can be multiple reasons behind the requirements to export contacts separately from Apple Mail to Outlook-

• The user is moving away from Apple-based devices to another device that uses Windows.
• The user wants to share some contacts with a user who is using the Windows platform.

Limitation of manual export/import process

In the manual process, where you export contacts from Apple Mail to Windows in VCF for CSV file is useful, but with full of loopholes. One major threat is the transfer of files between two computers. The file may become corrupt in the transferring media like Flash drive, Pen Drive, External Hard Drive, etc.

Sometimes, the structure of the file is changed during the conversion and when you open the file in Outlook, then the contacts details will be malformed and unusable.

Conclusion

The information presented in the above-mentioned methods is helpful for users who are using Apple Mail for managing their emails and wants to import Apple Mail Contacts to Outlook. If you do not want to take such risks with your information, then you can use that will OLM to PST Converterconvert OLM files to PST format.

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The benefit of using professional Best OLM to PST converter software is that it offers various filter options in which you can choose only contacts for conversion. It will maintain the structure, health, and availability of information that will remain useful in the Outlook application.