I have recently migrated from Windows Live Mail to eM Client, and so far I am favorably impressed with eM. One area where I liked WLM better is Contacts and groups of email addresses. I use several groups of email addresses when sending the same message to several members of an organization. Such groups are called Categories in WLM and Distribution Lists in eM. In WLM the Contacts page clearly displays a list with All Contacts and the total number of contacts at the top and all Category lists and their number of contacts below it. In eM I can only find my Distribution Lists in my very long list of contacts. I can then double click the name of the Distribution List to see what email addresses are contained in it. In WLM I had to only click on the Category name to see its list of email addresses. Am I missing a different place where eM might list all of my Distribution Lists together and make it easier to get to them?
Here is a related question: In WLM I could never find a way to export just the members of one Category as a set of VCF files - only my entire Contacts list. Is there a way to export VCF files in eM for only members of a Distribution List?
Russel, thank you for the reply. If such a VCF group file can be used for importing by another email program (Gmail, for example), that would be fine with me. Can you elaborate on how to create such a file from eM Client? If I locate my Distribution List in Contacts, right click and put my mouse on Export List, I’m given the two choices Export to CSV and Export to HTML… If instead I right click and then click Save As…, it offers to create a VCF file with the file name the same as the Distribution List name. I assumed that the group VCF file would contain al of the contacts in the group. I did that and then went back to Windows Live Mail to see if I could import the 50+ contacts that were in my original Distribution List from the file that was created. After the import, WLM showed only one contact with the name of the list - not the 50+ individual contacts. What did I do wrong?
I can’t say for sure how WLM will behave, but you can always open the exported VCF file in notepad and check if the addresses are in. As I try it according to your post, I can confirm it’s correct. The problem might be that WLM doesn’t recognize the Distribution list as a group.
Russel, I may have misunderstood what a group VCF file is. When I was using WLM I exported individual VCF files to a folder. Then using a command line, I did a DOS copy to combine all of those VCF file into a single file. Gmail was able to import my contacts from the combined file. Is the format of the eM group file one that is in general use, or is it unique to eM?
I did open the file that I exported from eM using Notepad and indeed, I saw names and email addresses along with other strange looking data. However, I didn’t see other info I had stored with the contacts in the Notes section.
That’s a type of VCF file (parameter X-KIND:group) and unfortunately, eM Client can’t export Distribution list contacts into separate VCFs and the WLM is probably unable to read the group VCF.
Other programs are able to read this VCF file but in case that these use Groups/Distribution lists in a different way than eM Client, it is possible that they wouldn’t import it correctly.
Thanks for the further explanation, Russel. Do you know if the Notes information is missing from that group VCF file? I didn’t see it when viewing with Notepad.