Exporting Contacts from Outlook to Windows Live Messenger

o0joecool0o — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 07:41:38 +0000

Well it seems I had a little issue crop up this week and I thought I would share it with you. I began getting messages from some friends on Windows Live Messenger stating that I had been asking them to purchase diet pills! I thought “how can I have a virus? I don’t click on anything strange” Well turns out somehow they had gotten my password for live messenger/hotmail. I still have no idea how they were able to do it, I do not browse shady sites or use the same password of anything that is “risky” my password was also 12 digits containing numbers and letters and capital letters. I really am not sure if it was brute force or what.

At any rate… I changed my password the messages stopped everything was ok again. (although i did start receiving 5 spam messages a day from other bots thereafter). I signed off msn and when i tried signing back in my new password didn’t work. now whether this is because the account was again hijacked using the forgot password or I just couldn’t remember my new password in its entirety I couldn’t and can no longer use my account.

So I signed up a brand new account and realized ugh all my contacts are of course gone. Luckily I had previously been using the hotmail outlook add in that lets you sync outlook with hotmail, all my contacts were still in outlook with all the IM addresses. “Hooray!” I said to myself.

I quickly began looking for a way to get these contacts out of outlook and into messenger again. I tried various things like dragging from outlook to messenger. Windows Live Messengers import options only allowed one file type “CTT”. Oddly enough Microsoft has not included a CTT export option for Outlook. So after sobbing for a few minutes about how long it was going to take me to get these contacts into live messenger one by one, I decided to write a small application to search outlook folders and export a CTT file. (A CTT file is simply an XML file under the hood in case you were wondering)

Anyway here is a link at Imperium Inc. to the export application should you need to export your contacts from outlook into windows live messenger! Enjoy! you will need the Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework installed first. (I think most people have this already)

Download OutlookToCTT

Grab A Life » outlook to messenger

Exporting Contacts from Outlook to Windows Live Messenger