{“I’m currently in the early stages of a working vacation with the family. The vacation portion involves taking my daughter to visit her grandmother. Work comes into the picture in the form of upgrading my mother from a rev A. iMac running Mac OS 9 to the current 1GHz iMac model, which sports Mac OS X 10.3.
After pulling the iMac from the box and doing the basics (assigning a user name, configuring email, and seeking an OS X version of Eric’s Ultimate Solitaire), the first task of real importance was to pull the contacts from her AOL address book into Apple’s Mail (yes, with my guidance, mom’s going to take off the training wheels and get a real ISP).
Because AOL is so darned proprietary, I had to jump through a couple of hoops to move those addresses. Here’s what I did:
On her old iMac I downloaded a copy of “,” from Apple’s website. This is an OS 9-compatible utility originally designed to extract AOL addresses for use in Claris Emailer. I took the resulting text file and copied it across a network I’d created between the two iMacs.
I fired up the copy of Entourage found in the test edition of Microsoft Office v. X (which is bundled with a number of new Mac models). Because Entourage is based on Emailer, it’s capable of importing the addresses pulled by AOL 3.0 Address Extractor.
Once I had the addresses in Entourage, I launched Apple’s Address Book and selected Import Addresses from Address Book’s AppleScript menu. In the resulting window, I selected Entourage and clicked OK. In next to no time, the addresses were in Address Book, ready for use by Mail.
Tomorrow: Mom moves from dial-up to cable modem. “}