What happens when you leave a Google Apps School? Part 3: Your Contacts

Keeping track of your contacts may or may not be important to you. But if you are like me, over the years you may have acquired a large number of them. Google apps organizes contacts into four groups:

• My Contacts, are entries you made. You either added the contact, modified one of the contacts from the other groups, or imported the contact from a list.
• Circles are contacts you added through Google+.
• Most contacted are just that, the people you normally correspond with. Their names pop to the top as you are typing in the address box.
• Other Contacts are all the other people you have sent an email to, including replies. 

That covers all the people you actually correspond with, however, if your Google Apps domain administrator has turned on "Directory Sharing", you see an additional listing called directory:

The Directory is a list of all of the contacts at your organization.

Exporting your Contacts....

First off, you can not export the directory of your organization. Workaround: Add the members of your organization to a group - a rather laborious task only for those who don't want to miss anyone from their contact list. But seriously if you haven't written to them by now (so they would appear in the "Other Contacts" list), you probably will not write them later.

Open your contact manager in Google by going to your email, then choosing Contacts under Mail:

Then choose Export under the "More" drop down menu:

You can make separate exports of "My Contacts" and "Most Contacted" under the group button, or you can import all of your contacts which would include those two, plus your "Circle" and "Other Contacts".

Save the contacts in the format you would like to preserve the information for future use.