We just released the Dash Email Contacts Importer. With this small application you will be able to import CSV files from any email system so that you can use your email contacts with Dash, even if you don’t have Windows Address book.

Download it here

(Report problems by opening a support ticket )

The wizard will guide your through the import process, but you will need to export your contacts first, so here are guides for exporting your contacts to a CSV file in most email systems:

Outlook

1. In Outlook, on the File menu, click Import and Export.
2. Click Export to a file, and then click Next.
3. Click Comma Separated Values (Windows), and then click Next.
4. In the folder list, click the Contacts folder, and then click Next.
5. Browse to the folder where you want to save the contacts as a .csv file.
6. Type a name for the exported file, and then click OK.
7. Click Next.
8. Click Finish.

Thunderbird

1. In Thunderbird, select Window | Address Book from the menu.
2. Highlight the desired address book in the Address Books list.
   • If you are not sure which to select, choose Personal Address Book.
3. Select Tools | Export… from the menu.
4. Make sure Comma Separated (*.csv) is set under Format:.
5. Choose a location (your Desktop, for example) and file name.
6. Click Save.

Gmail

1. Log in to your Gmail account.
2. Click Contacts along the left side of any Gmail page.
3. Click Export in the upper-right corner of your Contacts list.
4. Select the format in which you’d like to export your contacts’ information.
   • Gmail CSV (for import into another Gmail account): formats your contacts’ information so you can easily import it into another Gmail account.
     • This option encodes your CSV file in Unicode/UTF-8.
   • Outlook CSV (for import into Outlook clients, including Outlook Express): formats your contacts’ information so you can easily import it into various versions of Microsoft Outlook.
     • This option encodes your CSV file based on your language preferences, since Outlook doesn’t accept Unicode files. When you import your contacts into Outlook, some entries may become garbled if they contain characters that aren’t part of your language’s character set.
5. Click Export Contacts.
6. Select a location to save your file, and click OK.

Hotmail

1. Select Contacts from the top Hotmail navigation bar.
2. Click Print View.
3. Highlight the contents of the table (including the headings Name, E-Mail and Phone as well as all your contacts) with the mouse.
4. Press Ctrl-C , to copy the table.
5. Create a new spreadsheet document in Excel or OpenOffice.org.
6. Select Edit | Paste from the menu.
7. Look for rows that have the E-Mail column empty.
8. You can sort the data by the column to find and manipulate them en bloc.
9. If you have any email addresses in the first, the Name column, cut and paste them to the second, the E-Mail column.
10. In the E-Mail column, remove all whitespace characters.
    • In Excel, right-click in an email field and select Column | Trim from the menu.
    • In OpenOffice.org, you can search for “[:space:]+$” (excluding the quotation marks), making sure Regular expressions is checked under More Options, and replace it with nothing.
11. Select File | Save As… from the menu.
12. Make sure you use CSV (Comma delimited)(*.csv) or Text CSV (.csv) or a similar format involving “CSV” for saving the file.

Yahoo Mail

1. Click the down arrow next to the Addresses tab in the Yahoo! Mail navigation bar.
2. Select Import Contacts from the menu.
3. Look for Yahoo! CSV under Export and click Export Now.
4. Click Save when prompted what to do with the file download.
5. Choose the location where you want to save the Yahoo.csv copy of your Yahoo! Mail address book.