How to Export Your Yahoo Mail Address Book

The email clients and services you use may change, but the people you communicate with probably remain mostly the same. That's why it is so important for you to be able to take your address book with you when you switch email providers.

In Yahoo Mail, it's not only easy to manage your contacts, it's also easy to export them to a format that enjoys almost universal popularity and compatibility: CSV. Importing email addresses from CSV files in some email providers may not always work perfectly, but usually it does, and you retain all your email addresses.

To export your Yahoo Mail address book to a CSV file:

1. Open Yahoo Mail.
2. Select the Contacts icon. Depending on your version of Yahoo Mail, the icon is located either at the top of the left navigation panel or the right navigation panel.
3. Click All Contacts in the list of contact lists to export all your contacts or select a subset of contacts.
4. Click Actions at the top of the Contacts screen.
5. Select Export… from the drop-down menu that appears.
6. Choose the desired format. Pick Yahoo CSV for a generic .csv file. Other options include Microsoft Outlook, Netscape/Thunderbird, vCard Single File, and vCard, Zip of .VCF files.
7. Click Export Now. The download starts immediately.
8. Close the Export contacts screen by clicking the X in the right corner.

Yahoo Mail saves the contacts to your default download folder in a file entitled yahoo_contacts.csv.