1st step: Export Your Gmail Contacts

-   Go to Google Contacts

- Open your browser and go to: https://contacts.google.com - Make sure you're signed in to the correct Gmail account. - Select Contacts to Export - On the left sidebar, click Export

Under Which contacts do you want to export?, choose: “Selected contacts” (if you want specific ones) or “All contacts” to export them all - Choose the Export Format - Format = Google CSV. (This is the best one for this) - Click Export It will download a file like contacts.csv, which usually goes somewhere like your Downloads folder

2nd STEP: Find the File You Just Downloaded

   Open File Explorer
   Click on Downloads (left side)
   You should see a file named something like contacts.csv - You don’t need to open it,  just know it's there.

Final step: Import Into Thunderbird 141.0

Open Thunderbird In the top-right corner, click the ☰ Menu (3 lines)

Go to

Tools > Import A window will open. Choose: "From a File" (e.g. Address Books) Then click Continue

- On the next screen, choose: - IMport Address Books (CSV) - Then click Continue

Thunderbird will ask for the file. Click Browse

  -  Go to your Downloads folder
  -   Select the contacts.csv file and click Open
  -    You’ll now see a field matching screen

Thunderbird will try to match the Gmail fields to its own (like Name, Email, etc) Tip: You can click and drag the fields to match them if needed. Usually, Thunderbird does a decent job auto-matching these.

- Once matched, click Import

Done! 

Your Gmail contacts should now show up in Thunderbird’s Address Book Hopefully this helps!

Hi again and thank you so much ThundaMike. This is a god-send! There's no explanation out there..either on other forums, blogs, vlogs, or YouTube. This looks so easy. I have tried it once but still have some problems: Your instruction as I import to TB: "Thunderbird will ask for the file. Click browse" There is no browse option here. Instead, there is "Choose comma or tab seperated file (.csv, .tsv) So I select that choice. Other options listed are LDIF file. Vcard file. SQLite database file. Mork database file. Again, I chose Common or tab seperated file. Don't know if that was correct... Then it all goes to hell...but I get to the sport where there is a page of display choices... "Import Address Book file. Match field names." I usually display first, last, primary email, home phone, home address, home city, home state, home zip code, work phone, work address. Then it displays a file from a secondary email account that I have...although I'm sure that the one I chose is my primary email account. I double checked myself and it's the PRIMARY Gmail account that I sign into as my first step. Have I gone so far down the rabbit hole that I can't get back out??? Look forward to your helpful reply. Thanks.

@thundamike, maybe you can help me. I've been struggling with this all week. And, I'm not a novice by any means. Everyone wants to say, "export contacts from gmail account ins adress book etc" But my problem is, I do not have any saved contacts in my gmail contact list. So, therefore, I can't simply export those. So, I have downloaded Thunderbird and imported all of my gmail emails in the hopes of somehow exporting my contact from there, but HOWWWW???? I need the contacts from the emails since I have no saved contacts. So, I can download them into a CSV.