going with Gmail contacts

There're 3 view on Contacts page.

Frequently Mailed
All Contacts
Groups

The first view will show the mail addresses which you most frequently mailed in past days. It also contains the goups as same as the mail addresses.

You could create your own named groups for getting your contacts order. The conception of Groups is like "tag" which allow you give multi tags on one item. That means you are able to assign one contact to more than one group. This is very helpful.

The most powerful feature with gmail is the search. It also comes with Contacts. You're able to search all the fields definded on contacts such as full name, email account, email domain name, notes for persons, phone, whatever. And the search is going with all operations where you feel you need it.;) As the search result, you could pick up one or a group of them for operation, such as sending email or managing goups.

With the powerful contacts search the groups feature is a little bit redundant as my personal opinion, however the group is still a more convenient way for sending a group mail quickly in most cases than searching. But the group will take more efforts for getting order.

More about importing and exporting a batch of contacts please continue to read.

gmail could import comma delimited .csv file which as utf-8 or unicode format.

gmail provides 2 output formats for exporting

Gmail csv
Outlook csv

The Gmail csv is using utf-8 encode.

Gmail.csv

The Chinese parts could not be displayed correctly in excel or ultredit. The windows notepad could show the chinese correctly but the lines are mixed as one. A solution I found is open the Gamil csv by Notepad first, then save as, and choose Unicode at the Encodeing selection.

Gmail_unicode.csv

Open the new saved file by excel, then excel will ask you how to format this csv file in it, choose as Delimited and the Delimiters is Comma(,), then it works out. You will get a good-looking csv file. Save this file as .csv in excel.

Gmail_unicode_excel.csv

Gmail_unicode_excel.csv could be imported correctly by Gmail, but Gmail_unicode.csv Not! the difference is the former added the additional Comma(,) at the end of each line for blank columns, like this.

Jennifer,xxx_liu@hotmail.com,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

The later's like this.

Jennifer,xxx_liu@hotmail.com,

There's no feature for exporting contacts in hotmail, but Gmail provides a tip for doing it, please see the help of Gmail Importing, there's a video clip prepared.