Moving an address book from one mail program to another used to be enough of a technical problem that somebody built an entire Web service around it. InterGuru says it has been doing exactly that since 1996, and the converter is still sitting there surrounded by the names of mail programs that now read like a software archaeology checklist.
Visit InterGuru’s E-Mail Address Book Conversions
The page converts contact lists between formats used by Eudora, Pine, Elm, Pegasus, CompuServe, Spry, Lotus cc:Mail, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Internet Mail, Netscape, AOL, Claris Emailer, T-Online, LDIF files, CSV-style databases and several other formats.
That list is the interesting part.
Today contacts are usually buried inside a cloud account and synchronized behind the scenes. In the 1990s and early 2000s, changing mail clients could mean figuring out which program stored names in which proprietary file, exporting what you could, and praying the destination application understood it. A Web-based converter was not a novelty. It solved an irritating migration problem that ordinary users actually encountered.
InterGuru’s interface still reflects that world. You choose a source format, choose a destination format, push Continue, and follow the instructions. There is no attempt to disguise the machinery behind a giant onboarding flow. The page assumes you know whether your contacts came from Pine, Eudora, Netscape 3, Lotus Notes, or a Unix .mailrc file.
One surviving subpage even preserves a 1998 update about a small utility for extracting names and addresses from Microsoft’s Exchange personal address book and generating text files suitable for import elsewhere. The language is casual, practical and unmistakably from the era of people swapping little conversion programs because somebody needed one.
For webmasters, the durability lesson is almost embarrassingly simple: a narrowly useful page can outlive the software ecosystem it served. InterGuru is now partly a reference document for dead mail clients, but the original problem is still understandable because the site names the formats, applications and workflow precisely.
That kind of specificity is why the larger 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list is useful. Old pages often preserve the connective tissue between technologies that modern histories skip.
InterGuru is still online, still recognizable, and still asking questions like whether your address book came from Netscape 3.