Sync Contacts: Gmail, Blackberry & OSX

July 15, 2009

Recently I’ve noticed that my gmail had about 4,000 contacts listed and some of my students or family members were listed 4 or 5 different times (with the same name even). Since I have a Blackberry, iPod Touch, MacBook Pro, and Gmail, Gmail wasn’t necessary my contact list of choice albeit this list was out of control!

Gmail contact list just isn’t that friendly and much of the automation is annoying, like adding people to my contacts who I replied to for some reason. If my Mum sends a joke, copies me and a coworker, I reply all, then I am suddenly friends with her coworker. I should be able to choose my contacts. Moreover, Gmail contacts does not have any synchronous connection to my other address books. I can import/export to my heart’s content.

Now my iPod touch is the easiest connection. It syncs in the background with Mobile Me. I never even think about it, and it connects with Address Book on my MacBook Pro. Now we all know that devices that are not natively OSX have a hard time syncing, but we found Missing Sync a few years ago. They aren’t cheap but they get the job down (I’ve used the Blackberry sync but always have problems). Now my Blackberry syncs to my Address Book…. 1,100 contacts!

But I still have that problem with my 3,000 Gmail contacts, many are duplicates and Gmail contacts has no duplicate merge like Address Book does so well. So now I was thinking and this was my final conclusion.

1. Sync BlackBerry to Address Book. Run a Duplicate Merge action on Address Book. Then clean Address Book. Get rid of all the extra copies of addresses and everything. Try to identify who contacts are. I may know that John Franklin and I went on the same European tour with our students now, but in three years I may have no idea who he is. Categories them, or at least add notes.

2. Export my Address Book and call it something like “Pre-Gmail Backup”. Save this file where you won’t lost it. You can just save this as an Archive file.

3. Now go to address book, select All Contacts, and delete them. Yes, go ahead and delete them. You have a back up. Really, it’s ok.

4. Open Gmail Contacts and export them to a VCF file. Gmail should save a file to your desktop called contacts.vcf.

5. Go back into Address Book and open this file you just created. This action will open all of your Google contacts into Address Book. The first thing I did at this point was merge all duplicates. Then I carefully deleted all the contacts who I was positive I already had in my “Pre-Gmail Backup” file.

Now here’s where you have some different options. In your address book, you will have hundreds of email address that you won’t recognize. You can 1) copy and paste each into Gmail to see who it might be. This may take sometime but will help you catch email address you really need to make into contacts, rather than just delete people you don’t know; or 2) delete people you don’t recognize, knowing the ones who matter will probably email you again later. Neither is perfect but neither is being popular enough to have 1K+ contacts.

6. Once you have a pretty good idea of which Gmail contacts are 1) not in your “Pre-Gmail backup” and 2) are needed, export them to a .csv file, which will open in Excel (or any other spreadsheet program). Save this file.

7. Open this .csv file in Excel to make sure the information is all there. (Yes, the formatting will be ugly but it’s the best way I could figure out how to do this without corrupting my clean master address book (i.e. “Pre-Gmail backup”).

8. Go to your “Pre-Gmail backup”. Double Click on that file. Address Book will pop up and ask if you want to copy over your whole address book. Choose YES. This action will now reinstate my Master Address book.

9. Now this is where it’s a little messy. Flip between your Address Book and Excel. Add those people in Excel who are truly missing from Address Book back into your master contact list in Address Book. (Depending on how many you have, this takes time.)

Of course, when doing this make sure to run searches on each of these .csv contacts before just adding them to Address Book to make sure they’re not already there. If they are, do not readd!

10. Once you’ve gone through your whole .csv list, scroll through your Address Book to make sure everything looks right. Then export the Archive file again. Date it and call it something like “Master Archive MMYYYY”. Keep this file safe.

11. Now also export your Address Book as a .vcf file. (This is the easiest file to import to Gmail.)

12. Go into Google contacts. Choose “All Contacts”, then click on the large button that says “Delete Contact”. (Make sure you clicked on All Contacts, not just My Contacts, or you will not fix your problem.) Yes, it’s ok to delete your contacts. You still have them.

13. Now import your Master .vcf file into Gmail contacts. This may take a few minutes be patient.

14. Now that you have all your master contacts in Gmail, you will notice that your Mailing Lists and chat settings are gone. This is a caveat to this process. You need to readd people (but you know what? If your lists were like mine, you need a clean sweep anyway.)

15. Now back to the Blackberry. Whatever sync program you use (Missing Sync probably) will have an option to “overwrite device”. Choose this option and then sync your Blackberry. This will make the Master Address Book match your Blackberry exactly. This also matches your iTouch (through Mobile Me).

Now we all know that as soon as one person emails you that isn’t in your address book, your contacts are off. As soon as you add one person to your Blackberry, your contacts are off. There are things you can do about this, like add in Gmail & mobile simultaneously (will never happen) or never sync anything (which you wouldn’t consider if you’ve read this far).

On more note, I know Gmail contacts now has cloud sync but it’s ugly and if your contact list was messy as mine, this process above needs to be completed first before you play with that.

Hope it helps.

Posted in Blackberry, google, technology