Email Contacts
Most computer users value their email contacts more than almost anything else that resides on their computers.
Even if casual users don't feel the need to backup their documents, losing their email contacts is one thing that is most likely to cause them to feel the biggest loss.
For most of us, if we lose our contacts without a backup, we just have to wait until someone emails us before we can get that contact back on our computer and into our email program.
If you are keeping your email on your ISP's website, this may not be a problem, unless of course, you change your ISP!
There is a very easy way to avoid this problem. Backup your email contacts to an external drive! If all you want to protect from loss is your email contacts, just about any size flash drive or memory card will work.
For most email programs including Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Microsoft Office, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc, using the File/Export to .csv will save your contacts in a form that you can import back into your email program in the event of a crash or into another email program if you decide to change how you receive your email. Once you save the .csv file to external media (flash drive, CD or an external hard drive), you can simply import it back into the email program of your choice.
There are a few differences in the way some email programs handle the Import/Export process, but just about all of them will allow you to save your contacts to a file.
In all of the Microsoft email clients the process is basically the same. You click File and then Import. To save the contacts file, select Export.
To import the Address book, you select File/Import and point to the saved file. This procedure is basically the same in all email clients. You may need to copy the file from the external media and save it to a location on your computer.
There are many email clients available, some free and some paid. The methods used for backing up contacts vary slightly, but generally they will all involve exporting to a file. If you just want to use the same program over and over again, the default file for that program will work. But in the event you want to change email programs, using the .csv file method will allow you to import your contacts into another email program.
Of course, you can always print a list of your contacts and then type in all those contacts when you have a new computer or are rebuilding from a computer crash. But why would you want to do all that extra work?