Digging through a retired colleague's files I found the office contact list as a .nab file, apparently a Netscape address book from the early 2000s.
Nothing on my machine opens it. What are the workable routes into Outlook contacts?
Import NAB file to Outlook PST: multiple approaches
Solved Email & Outlook
RK
Rachel Kim May 16, 2016
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NAB is the Netscape Communicator address book and nothing modern reads it directly, but two routes still work because the format's descendants live on.
Route one, the Thunderbird relay. Thunderbird descends from Netscape and its address book still imports LDIF, the export format of that era. If the colleague's machine or backup also holds an .ldif export next to the .nab, import it straight into Thunderbird via Tools, Import, then re-export from Thunderbird as CSV and feed that to Outlook's import wizard.
Route two when only the raw .nab exists: the file is a Mork database, a text format you can mine by hand. Open it in a text editor and the names and addresses are visible among the markup. For a few dozen contacts, copying them into a spreadsheet and saving as CSV beats any tooling. For hundreds, a Mork parser script from GitHub reads it into clean rows first.
Either way the last step is identical: Outlook's File, Open and Export, Import/Export wizard with Comma Separated Values into the Contacts folder, using Map Custom Fields to line the columns up.
Found an ldif in the same backup folder, went through Thunderbird and out as CSV. 140 contacts recovered from the year 2003.