Contacts are designed to be synced with a supported application on your computer. This is so common with Windows users - here anyway - not having contacts available on their computer. How does one get by without having contact info available on their computer, or having email addresses only for contacts on their computer, telephone numbers only for contacts on their cell phone, and mailing addresses who knows where? Not a good idea to depend on an iPhone or any cell phone only for contact info - along with having to manually enter all contact info on a cell phone, which can be lost or stolen.
With Windoze, you can sync contacts with Outlook 2003 or 2007 along with syncing calendar events, or with the address book used by Outlook Express or by Windows Mail (depending on the Windoze version) called Windows Contacts for syncing contacts only. You may not have Outlook 2003 or 2007, but you have Windows Contacts available.
If Windows Contacts is empty - no contact info, before the first sync enter one contact in Windows Contacts. Make the contact up if needed, which can be deleted later. This will provide a merge prompt with the first sync for this data, which you want to select. Syncing contacts with Windows Contacts is selected under the Info tab for your iPhone sync preferences with iTunes.
After your contacts are available in Windows Contacts, you can export the contacts from there in a CSV file for import by Yahoo or Gmail.
I really hope you can help me. Someone hacked into my SNET (Yahoo) account and sent an email to all 661 contacts saying I was robbed in London and needed money. With SNET's help I was able to reset my password after six tries but the hacker deleted all my contacts. SNET can't recover them and I have no way of sending out a note telling people the original email was bogus. All my contacts are still on my iPhone but I've tried syncing with Yahoo, Outlook, Windows Contacts and Google with no luck. They did export to Gmail but only the names with no other details. Is there no way other way to export the contacts from iTunes? Is there a way to send a mass email to everyone in my iPhone contacts?
You can't believe the number of calls I'm getting from concerned friends and I have no way of sending out a mass email to tell them it was all a hoax.
As a side note, the hacker got into my facebook account too and that took a long time to reset. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help!
Me again. I was able to export my contacts to Outlook and from there export them to a csv file but when I tried to do an import to Yahoo it said the file contained 0 contacts. I have Outlook 2002. Is that the problem. I'm getting very frustrated. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks for the tips, Allan, but I still cannot export my iPhone contacts to Outlook or Windows address book following those steps. It looks like iTunes goes through all the motions, but when I check Outlook or Windows address book (I tried both), the list is empty. Even the made up contact I put into Windows address book didn't get transferred to my iPhone. I'm stumped. I didn't think it was so complicated to back up my iPhone contacts to something other than iTunes in case I wanted to use them for other applications and devices. Is it supposed to be this complicated? Is this an Apple trick to get you to buy Mobile Me? Any idea why my export to Outlook or Windows address book didn't work?