If you use Gmail, you may be interested in importing your contacts into Thunderbird. This can be helpful if you want to keep all of your contact information in one place, or if you want to use Thunderbird as your email client and not rely on Gmail. To import your contacts into Thunderbird, open the Thunderbird contact manager and select the “Import…” button. On the import dialog box, enter the following information:

  1. The path to the Gmail contact file (.csv or .xml)
  2. The name of the new contact folder in Thunderbird
  3. The name of the new contact file in Gmail
  4. The email address of the person you are importing contacts into Thunderbird from
  5. The email address of the person you are importing contacts into Thunderbird to ..

Log into you Gmail account and select Contacts and select specific or All contacts you want to Export. 

  

Now choose CSV (Comma Separated Values) format so we can import the contact list into Thunderbird and click the Export button.

Download the file to a location onto the hard drive.  As you can see below I use the Firefox extension DownloadThemAll.

The next step is importing that file into Thunderbird.  Open Thunderbird and go to Tools Import.  Keep the default selection and click Next.

Select Text file (LDIF,.tab,.csv,.txt) and click Next.

Explorer will open up for you to browse to the directory where the saved Gmail contacts file is located.  You will probably need to select All Files and then double click on the .csv file.

  

Now we can select the amount of data to transfer.  After making the appropriate selections here click OK. 

Finally the Import process will execute and we are finished!