I have over 200 contacts in my WLM all organised into groups. I want to export them from my old account into new one but wish to preserve the groups so that when I import them into new account, every contact is placed in the same group that it was in my old account.

Please tell me this is possible as I have too many contacts to organise.

Thanks.


Edit:
I want to export the full information too like you can with normal export in hotmail/live account, i.e. first name, last name, address, notes etc. but keep every contact associated with the group its in.

from buddy list go to

contact and save contact list and then sign on new account go to same place but go to import and there u go

That wasn't the question.

I know how to export contacts from within WLM. I wanted to export the contacts AND preserve the groups. I thought I made it clear.

Basically, you can't.

You can export and import your contacts, but groups will not be retained.

Oh mannn

Would it be possible to write a script for this? If so, could someone do it plz.

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
Basically, you can't.

You can export and import your contacts, but groups will not be retained.

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Thanks for the suggestion but had tried that already. It doesn't work. The groups disappear.

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Originally posted by Conqueror
Oh mannn

Would it be possible to write a script for this? If so, could someone do it plz.

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Isn't there any other way? Maybe like exporting each group one at a time? That would be better than nothing.

No, not with the export feature....


However, doing a quick search:

If your old Windows Live ID is in the form of abc@uvw.xyz (thus _not_ a @hotmail or @msn account) you can change your Windows Live ID by going to http://login.live.com/

Go there, login with your old ID.
On the account summery page (the one that opens up first) you can click on the link next to your ID: "Change" to simply change to a new ID.

You don't need to do anything else; all your data, contacts, etc will automatically be moved to the new ID within 48 hours. But note that during that transiation time you can experience login problems in Windows Live Messenger and your contacts can experience problems seeing you online.

Unforunately, my old account was @hotmail and my new one is @live. So I don't see the option to change my ID. Even if it was possible, I would like to keep my old ID for a while.

The other option is to export each group (we have/had a script, to choose contacts to export) or you can modify the data in the .ctt

then import each group separately then re-group and rename the group, makes it slightly easier to work with than importing the whole contact list at once

Yes, thats what I was thinking about. Exporting each group and then importing and renaming. Modifying the whole .ctt file doesn't improve much on the time it takes and the inconvience.

I am interested to know about that script which lets you export the contacts we choose. I have tried searching for it but didn't find anything.

There are scripts for group blocking. How do they work if they don't have access to group information, as CookieRevised pointed out? Could a script be written from this idea, but instead of blocking the contacts in the group, it could write the contact in a file, one after another in the group.

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Originally posted by Conqueror
There are scripts for group blocking. How do they work if they don't have access to group information, as CookieRevised pointed out?

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Group blocking scripts have been in existence since old days! I remember using them. Not sure if they have changed the way they work these days. More than likely that they have. But I am using Vista.

The group blocking script did not interact with WLM's contact groups at all. The script uses a user-defined set of groups that need to be created within the script itself, and have no relation to the groups within WLM.

What about the older scripts which didn't need groups to be created within the script?

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Originally posted by MeEtc
The group blocking script did not interact with WLM's contact groups at all. The script uses a user-defined set of groups that need to be created within the script itself, and have no relation to the groups within WLM.

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Anyway, I don't think I will find a way (unless someone writes a program/script) since I want to export full details about the contacts too, such as first name, last name, address, notes etc. the way you can with normal export through (live) hotmail account... but to preserve the groups the contacts belong to in WLM.

I haven't found anything that can do this. Thanks for all the suggestions so far.

if you use filemon to check out which files are writ too on adding a group you'll find that for each group created there is an individual RSA encrypted file created in doc & settings/user/contacts/liveid/  with the extention .windowslivegroupfile, or something like that, the more peeps in the group the more populated the file.

unfortunalty these are ecrypted to your user account so you can't simply change them, they're also refferenced in the .cashe contacts file in the same folder.

from what i can work out, it's a standard crypt that just groups your contacts in each file. unfortunalty it was an oversite on the orriginal devs not to put the damned groupings in the orriginal XML file used with just the live ID's,

these encrypted files will hold 'i belive' all contact inf about each contact. if they don't and only simply hold the live ID of you contacts then why in the world are they encrpyted. oh well.

They are encrypted to keep the windows live ids of your contacts safe from peeking eyes (such as email gathering malicious programs).

You can turn this encryption off by going to WLM's options:
Tools > Options > Security > Encrypt contact list data so that it is not accessible outside of Windows Live Messenger.

But turning this off wont do any good for the OP's issue, when importing contacts WLM does not take into account any group information anyways to begin with.

Ehm it actually is quite easy if I'm not mistaken.

You can use the method I use in the groupblocking script.

Double click on a group name, this will give you the edit group screen, copy the information in the bottom input box. Save that in a text file, do this for every group. After that you can just export, import, make a new group, edit it, paste the info back and voila...

Not as easy as an automated script but a lot easier then doing it 1 contact at the time...

quote:

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Originally posted by smokeya
if you use filemon to check out which files are writ too on adding a group you'll find that for each group created there is an individual RSA encrypted file created in doc & settings/user/contacts/liveid/  with the extention .windowslivegroupfile, or something like that, the more peeps in the group the more populated the file.

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quote:

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Originally posted by foaly
Save that in a text file, do this for every group. After that you can just export, import, make a new group, edit it, paste the info back and voila...

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Originally posted by Conqueror

I wouldn't mind doing this if it worked. but how do you actually import the contacts you've just saved back into a group once you've saved them into a text file? I don't think it's possible and I think this has already been discussed on previous page.

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quote:

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Originally posted by boli06
What you have to do is copy the text on the window that appears when you double click a group (check the attached picture to see what you need to copy), do this for each group. Then export all your contacts and then import.

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quote:

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After that create each group you had and double click and paste the text you copied to each matching group. That way you recreate the group.

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Much apologies for resurrecting an old thread...
but I think it's funny that the old MSN Messenger could export the group contacts. (It couldn't import them from what I could tell)

Screenshot attached.

Yes, it was removed in MSN Messenger 8.0.

But it is also correct that there isn't a way to import the saved group file back into a new group.

You can only import the file as 'loose' contacts, the group name and group info isn't saved. Of course you could move the imported contacts to a group afterwards.

Although it was removed since MSN Messenger 8.0, it still exists in MSN Messenger 7.0.0820, which is still supported and can still be downloaded from Microsoft Download Center and installed. However you first need to uninstall your latest Messenger version in order to be able to install MSN Messenger 7.0.

To uninstall Windows Live Messenger 14 you need to go to your Add/Remove software and choose "Windows Live Essentials". (If you still also have "Windows Live Messenger" in the list you need uninstall that first!).

Hi all,

We had the same problem (3,000 contacts in groups of several hundreds) and finally found a solution that is very easy.

The adresses are clear and fully written in the Cci field when you send a mail. So The easiest way to export and preserve groups is to :

- Send an email to each group separately to warn them for example, that you have a new email adress / Or open an email you sent to each groupe in the past.

- Then copy the Cci: field with all the adresses of one group.

- Open Notepad or Textedit and paste the adresses of that group. They are all seperated with ";".

Either you can also paste that directly in your new email account, or you need a better file than that. In our case, we needed to paste one adress per line, and with " ; " in a text field. So what we did was :

- Save that text file with all the adresses, naming it for example "group1.csv". You need to change the extension to csv.

- Open that CSV in Excel or its equivalent with Open Office.

- Choose the " ; " as a seperating caracter. Then it will put all the adresses horizontally, one per column.

- Then, Copy that long line.

- Create a new page or file.

- Click 'Edit' / 'Edition', 'special paste' , and click 'transpose'. (sorry, it may not be the right words cause i'm translating directly from french)

Then you have all the adresses from ONE group, listed vertically and without ";". Just copy it and paste wherever you need.

This question dates back to 2006. Five years ago, but I hope it can still help.

Bye