I don’t know how this got complicated but it did so here’s a blog post on how I rescued a load of contacts off a Microsoft account without owning a Windows device and therefore Outlook on the desktop.

I’ve very much moved away from Microsoft as my email, calendar and storage provider. My new provider is Proton who are a privacy centric outfit based in Switzerland. The very last bit to move has been the contacts which Proton can do in the Mail client but doesn’t sync with devices so that you can use them in the phone and messenger apps. I posses an Apple iPhone and whilst I don’t use Apple iCloud for mail, calendar, etc I was using it for Tasks. I decided contacts can be stored there for now.

I’ve tried various tactics to get my contacts away from Microsoft but nothing seemed to work. If I had to make an educated guess this isn’t straightforward to do on a technical level as Microsoft’s Exchange and Apple’s iCloud (which is presumably an implementation of CardDAV) will store information in different formats. Microsoft will spit out a CSV; iCloud only accepts contact cards. There’s never much motivation to a provider to make the export process any easier when it’s about migrating away so I decided not to expect a straightforward time.

There’s probably a better way of doing this but as I no longer own a Windows device here’s how I achieved the move in an abstract:

1. In Outlook.com export all the contacts into a CSV file. 
2. Check your CSV file using your favourite text editor for any errors, duplicated contacts or anyone who’s unfortunately become a bit of an enemy. 
3. In Evolution perform an import into the local contacts folder.
4. Setup your iCloud Contacts account in Evolution to the CardDAV address https://contacts.icloud.com.
5. Drag and drop all the contacts into the iCloud account.

You could do the process in fewer steps by importing direct to iCloud instead of the local Evolution folder however I found that Evolution would go unresponsive and not provide a progress indicator. I had 162 contacts and I observed the process to be overall slower by importing direct i.e: it seemed to work faster importing locally then copying to iCloud.

The caveat was that no matter what date format I used in the Microsoft CSV it wouldn’t import to Evolution or produce an error as to why it hadn’t. I had to manually re-enter the dates in my contacts in iCloud.

For my next trick I’m considering setting up a local contacts server such as Radicale.

(* Pulling teeth is an expression that means to do something that ends up quite painful to do like pulling out teeth without anaesthetic!)