ABY Converter

Extract text from AOL address books (ABY)


Drop or upload your .ABY file
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How to extract text from your ABY file

  1. Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your ABY file.
  2. You’ll see a preview, if available.
  3. Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.

Convert ABY to another file type

To convert ABY address books to another format, you need AOL Desktop or other Data software.

Convert a file to ABY

To convert other file formats to the "Address Book File" file type, you need software like AOL Desktop or a similar tool.


About ABY files

The .ABY file is an obsolete, proprietary contact database. .ABY files are legacy address book data files created by the old desktop versions of the AOL (America Online) client. They store a user's contact information, including names, email addresses, and phone numbers. Historically, these were managed directly within the AOL Desktop software. Today, the .ABY format is highly proprietary, severely outdated, and practically useless in modern workflows. You cannot natively import it into modern platforms like Gmail, Apple Contacts, or Microsoft Outlook. Users are frustrated because they cannot access their historical contacts without relying on legacy software. To make the data usable, you must convert these contacts to standard formats like CSV or VCF (vCard). During conversion, proprietary group sorting or AOL-specific metadata might be lost. Standard online converters fail because the .ABY file is a closed, undocumented format. Often, only the original AOL software can properly read or export the data. However, just drag and drop your file into convert.guru to identify the format, view it, and convert it when possible. We can inspect the file and show text or internal content. If our analysis detects a supported underlying or embedded format, viewing or data recovery may still be possible.

Convert.Guru analyzes your ABY file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.

Users also converted OCM, UD and AOL files.


FAQ

If you want to convert ABY file to CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT, DB or SQL, you can use AOL Desktop or similar software from the "Contact Data Storage" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….

To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to ABY, try AOL Desktop or another comparable tool in the "Contact Data Storage" category.



The ABY Converter Story

The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our ABY converter.