Want your Emacs BBDB contacts on your Android or iPhone?

The easiest way I’ve found is to export your contacts to CSV, then import them into something like Google Contacts. You can export your BBDB contacts using bbdb-to-outlook.el, which is available in the BBDB package in the bits/ directory. Download bbdb-to-outlook.el from Sourceforge if you can’t find it in your BBDB directory. To use:

1. Load bbdb-to-outlook.el and use M-x eval-buffer to load the code.
2. Use M-x bbdb to open your BBDB records, and search for . to show all the records. Alternatively, search for a subset of your records.
3. Type O to run bbdb-to-outlook and choose the file.

Tada! Step one done. Review the file and delete anything you don’t want to include.

To import the contacts into Google Contacts, go to Google Mail and click on Contacts. Click on Import and choose your file. After some time and some fiddling, you can get that synchronized onto your Android or iPhone.

I haven’t thought about syncing, but I’m trying to keep my BBDB as The Master File for Contacts anyway, as it’s so much more flexible than any other contact database I’ve tried. (Although gist.com is pretty cool and I do like the Android’s merging of photos, contact info, and updates…)

There was some work on synchronizing BBDB with the Palm, so that might be a possibility.

Enjoy!