I have switched away from using Outlook once again for variety of reasons - as part of my latest attempts to reduce complexity and increase security (more on that later) and went back to Thunderbird/Web based email systems on all Windows machines. Conversion of address books was piece of cake this time, thanks to Plaxo which I use to synchronize Mac and Windows based systems. Nonetheless, I got curious what format does Thunderbird use for address book and this way I have discovered the awkward Mork file format.

Typical way how to process this is using Perl or Python. Jamie Zawinski wrote one of the scripts in Perl. I normally do not consider reading Perl code to be my favorite leisure time activity (we all know that Perl is write-only language), but this time I did peek in. Here is pure jewel I have discovered inside:


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See the whole script. Who said that reading Perl script cannot be fun ?

Btw, if you are using Windows (which does not have the wonderful snapshot capabilities of Command-Shift-3/Command-Shift-4 keys), you may find Cropper very useful. It is free, opensource and works like charm. Requires .NET framework, but that's pretty much everywhere. Enjoy