Exporting Gmail Contacts Before Deleting iPhone Email Exchange Account

I set up my companies on google apps for businesses, since the solution has tremendous advantages in collaborating online and in using Gmail's comprehensive suit of tools. With only $50 AUD per year per user it is relatively cheap as well. One advantage is the compatibility with iPhones and it allows me to set up IMAP Exchange accounts for my company emails on my iPhone synching not only my emails, but also my contacts, notes and calendar entries. I recently had to delete an email account on my iPhone though and had to find out the hard way that suddenly many of my contacts were gone as well. My iPhone didn't even know the mobile phone number of my wife any more...

I did a bit of investigating and found out how to recover, export and install these lost contacts again. Here is how it works.

1. You need access to your old gmail account with all the contacts that you would like to keep. Open Gmail / google apps for business and click on "Contacts" in the main menu.
2. Click on "More" and then "Export". You can now select all your contacts as vcard export.
3. Unzip the file and you will find different vcards. I found the one called My_Contacts the important one with all my telephone numbers. All_contacts would have every email in it that you ever contacted and the other files are from your google plus account, so I did not import these.
4. Next I opened up my current gmail / google apps account and basically did the same steps above, except now I clicked "Import" in the drop down under "More". Since I have this email also set up as an IMAP exchange account on my iPhone all my lost contacts popped up again. 
5. The importing function has a cool feature by the way to remove duplicates. You will see the import job on the left hand side. Simply click on your import, go to "More" and then select "Find&Merge Duplicates"

Hope this was helpful and you read this blog article while you still had access to your old company email account. ;-)

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