P
paul_la75
Hi,
I wanted to post the solution to a strange problem I worked on, on a friend's computer running Vista... we were trying to import Outlook Express 6 contacts (from another machine) into Windows Mail on Vista. Went through the usual export/import procedure using a .wab file, and here's what would happen: the import would start, and would pop up a warning about a contact that didn't have an e-mail address; after I clicked OK on that, it would appear to scan in a few more contacts; then it would show this message: "Error importing to Windows Contacts" with no further explanation.
This drove me crazy for the better part of an hour -- I tried copying the .wab directly instead of exporting it; tried exporting to .csv and vCard formats; I stripped down the CSV file to a single record; then I stripped that one record down to just first name, last name and e-mail, and got the same unhelpful error message every time.
Finally I had the inspiration to try manually adding a contact, and that failed with a different message, something about not being allowed access to add the contact.
Then it hit me -- since Vista seems to store contacts as individual files, maybe the file permissions were messed up. Sure enough, the user account we were logged into only had READ permissions in the Contacts directory! I gave it Full Control rights on the directory, but it got errors in changing some of the files' permissions. I manually reset those to Full Control too (which worked without errors, strangely). Then we were able to import all the contacts successfully.
Long story short: to diagnose the "error importing to Windows Contacts" error, a good place to start is manually adding a contact. If that doesn't work, filesystem issues might be the culprit. If it does work, the problem may in your import file. I hope this info helps anyone else who runs into a similar situation.
-Paul
Post Originated from http://www.VistaForums.com Vista Support Forums
I wanted to post the solution to a strange problem I worked on, on a friend's computer running Vista... we were trying to import Outlook Express 6 contacts (from another machine) into Windows Mail on Vista. Went through the usual export/import procedure using a .wab file, and here's what would happen: the import would start, and would pop up a warning about a contact that didn't have an e-mail address; after I clicked OK on that, it would appear to scan in a few more contacts; then it would show this message: "Error importing to Windows Contacts" with no further explanation.
This drove me crazy for the better part of an hour -- I tried copying the .wab directly instead of exporting it; tried exporting to .csv and vCard formats; I stripped down the CSV file to a single record; then I stripped that one record down to just first name, last name and e-mail, and got the same unhelpful error message every time.
Finally I had the inspiration to try manually adding a contact, and that failed with a different message, something about not being allowed access to add the contact.
Then it hit me -- since Vista seems to store contacts as individual files, maybe the file permissions were messed up. Sure enough, the user account we were logged into only had READ permissions in the Contacts directory! I gave it Full Control rights on the directory, but it got errors in changing some of the files' permissions. I manually reset those to Full Control too (which worked without errors, strangely). Then we were able to import all the contacts successfully.
Long story short: to diagnose the "error importing to Windows Contacts" error, a good place to start is manually adding a contact. If that doesn't work, filesystem issues might be the culprit. If it does work, the problem may in your import file. I hope this info helps anyone else who runs into a similar situation.
-Paul
Post Originated from http://www.VistaForums.com Vista Support Forums