Shoutbox

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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I don't see such file even after disabling the encryption. I see one file per contact and most of them are just image files for display pictures. I don't see a file that has contact list in them in these folders.

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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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.

quote:

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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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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. 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.

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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I already tried all this before as I mentioned earlier in this thread. But I didn't know about this next bit you mentioned:

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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That actually works!!!

Although

I didn't know I could just paste the emails back into that group edit popup!!! I thought we could only select the contacts from the email list in the upper part of that window (upper section in your screenshot.)

Although I had posted this thread over 4 months ago and I did it manually the hard way. In future, I will use this method you mentioned. I'm surprised no one else realised this method, or maybe no one could be bothered to share it if they knew! hehe!

Although it's not the real solution to the problem, it's close enough. Thanks a lot dude!

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