aol service assistant, slightly better than nothing
For a long time, my parents have been held hostage by AOL. AOL, for ages, made it nearly impossible to use any tool other than their mega-integrated awful front end to The Internet. Even once they set up IMAP, you were stuck with their Favorites and Address Book. This was a big deal for my dad, who has a gigantic contact list. I’ve been heckling him to use Apple’s Address Book for ages, but he couldn’t get out.
Recently, AOL published the AOL Service Assistant, which lets you set up your Mac to work with your AOL settings. Most of this is trivial, but it exports your AOL Favorites (read: bookmarks) and your Address Book. This was great news, and I put it to use when setting up a new Mac for my mom a few weeks ago.
The big snag was that it exports contacts in a completely asinine way. As far as I can tell, AOL’s contact list has no concept of “person” or “group.” It just associates a name with a list of one or more email addresses. When you export your contact list to Address Book, each entry becomes a group, and each address in it becomes a person. That means that if you had “grandma@example.com” as the address for your “Nanny Smith” entry, you will now have a group called “Nanny Smith” with one person. That person will have no name, just an email address.
This is totally insane.
Mac::Glue made fixing this a whole lot less hateful than it might have otherwise been. Here’s the script I used:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Mac::Glue ':glue';
my $addr = Mac::Glue->new('Address Book');
my @groups = $addr->prop('groups')->get;
my %emails_for;
my %groups_for;
for my $group (@groups) {
my $name = $group->prop('name')->get;
my @people = $group->prop('people')->get;
if (@people == 1) {
# a one-address group is probably a person
my $person = $people[0];
my ($email) = map { $_->prop('value')->get } $person->prop('email')->get;
push @{ $emails_for{ $name } ||= [] }, $email;
} else {
# ...but a multipe-address group is probably a group for real real
my @emails =
map { $_->prop('value')->get }
map { $_->prop('email')->get }
@people;
for my $email (@emails) {
push @{ $groups_for{ $email } ||= [] }, $name;
}
}
}
my %local_part;
for my $email (keys %groups_for) {
print "$email\n";
my ($local_part) = split /\@/, $email;
unless (grep { $_ eq $email } map { @$_ } values %emails_for) {
my $i = ++ $local_part{ $local_part };
$emails_for{"$local_part $i"} = [ $email ];
}
}
# Okay, we've learned all we can, let's obliterate all the bogus cards.
$_->delete for $addr->prop('people')->get;
for my $name (keys %emails_for) {
my @emails = @{ $emails_for{ $name } };
my ($first, $last);
($first, $last) = split / /, $name, 2;
# Set up the address book card
my $person = $addr->make(
new => 'person',
with_properties => {
'first name' => $first,
'last name' => $last,
},
);
# Add the person's email addresses
for my $email (@emails) {
$addr->make(
new => 'email',
at => location(end => $person->prop('emails')),
with_properties => {
label => 'Home',
value => $email,
}
);
}
# Put each individual back into the groups in which they originally appeared.
my %group;
$seen{ $_ }++ for map { @{ $groups_for{ $_ } || [] } } @emails;
for (keys %group) {
next unless my $group = $addr->obj(group => whose(name => equals => $_));
$person->add(to => $group);
}
}
Basically, it converts any group with only one address into a person. For any group that had more than one address, if it can find a “person” for that address (in other words, that address appeared in another group with no other addresses) then the group remains a group, now with that person (and probably others) in it. It’s not perfect, but it got my mom’s 200+ member contact list into a state where hand-correcting it was not a huge problem.
I’d like to think that AOL will fix this in a future release, but I doubt it. I think that it’s not just awful programming, it’s a mismatch between the data structures of AOL’s and Apple’s address books.