I use Thunderbird email as my primary messaging tool. If you're like me and you have contacts spread out across a couple of IM networks, a couple of webmail apps, and Facebook, you're familiar with the pain of digging through those other accounts to get an email address so you can email someone from Thunderbird.
Tbird makes it pretty easy to add webmail accounts, and with them, your webmail contacts, but there's no easy way to get your Facebook friends into Thunderbird. It would be pretty awesome if Facebook just let you export your friends email addresses so you could import them into Thunderbird or if Facebook offered IMAP access to your Facebook messages, but I haven't been able to find this functionality and suspect they just don't offer it.
But there's good news. If you've got a Yahoo or Windows Live account (or are willing to create one) then you can use that as the intermediary and get all your Facebook friends into your Thunderbird addressbook in a few easy steps.
Here's the steps for Yahoo. (Live Mail is pretty much the same process.)
Make sure you're signed into your Yahoo account and visit the Yahoo Addressbook Import Contacts page where with a click and a confirmation, you can get all your Facebook friends into your Yahoo contacts list. Then, from the Contacts page in Yahoo Mail, go to Tools -> Export... and export your contacts for "Netscape / Thunderbird". This will give you a LDIF file of contacts on your local machine. Then go to Thunderbird Tools -> Import... and select Addressbook and then Text file. Locate the Yahoo LDIF file you saved (probably called yahoo_ab.ldif) and go ahead and import to Thunderbird.
And there you have it. Your Facebook friends are now your Thunderbird friends too. All of your Facebook friends will auto-complete in Thunderbird's message compose window and can now be easily reached via real email. You can also now easily bring those same friends to other web services like LinkedIn or Gmail.
thanks to techcruch commenter Ashley for the direct link to the Yahoo contacts importer.
