import contact groups

I have imported my contacts from Windows Mail (Vista), but the contact groups — similar to eMClient’s distribution lists — were not imported.  Is there a way to do this?  Thanks.

Not directly.

You can move each group to a separate folder n WLM, and then import them like that so they will at least be separate.

OK, thanks.

If you meant that I should take each group in turn and (in Vista, outside the Windows Mail program) manually copy the individuals in that group to a new contacts folder containing only those individuals; then export these folders of individual contacts — I haven’t tried that because it seems at least as much work as manually reconstructing the distribution lists in eMClient, which is what I think I will have to do.

Despite looking for a more automated method of doing this, I have concluded that there is no way in Vista to export group contacts in any form which eMClient can import.  You can go to your Vista Contacts folder, where both individual contacts (extension .contact ) and group contacts (extension .group ) are visible, you can create a subfolder for the group contacts, go to that folder, and (if you can conjure up the “export” button) export the contacts, either as .csv or .vcf.  But in either output format, only your individual contacts (all of them) are exported, while the group contacts are ignored, even though they are the only thing in the working folder.

One other thought occurs.  A   .group   file seems to be an xml file, with most of the content in binary.  Because it is in binary it is hard to know what information it contains, but it could hardly contain less than a list of the individuals in the group.  In theory, then, couldn’t eMClient read such a file and convert it to a distribution list, as part of its procedure to import contacts?  If necessary it could be assumed that the members of a group had already been imported as individuals.