Android contacts WTF moment!!! :eek:

manveruppd

manveruppd

manveruppd

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Just opened the People app on my DesireZ and found in it the email addresses of a couple of hundred former students of mine from back when I was a teaching assistant at uni! :eek:

I have NO idea where it got them from, because they're not in my contacts anywhere - not on GMail, not in Outlook, not on anywhere else like Facebook or whatever! The way I used to contact them was I would keep all their addresses in a .txt file and then simply paste them all into the BCC field in an email - did the phone actually crawl through my emails and add every single person I ever corresponded with regardless of whether I had them in my contacts or not??? And if so, how the hell do I undo it? I can't possibly delete all these people one by one, I can't just hold down Shift and select multiple contact entries like I could on my old WinMo phone, and it's not like I can delete them in GMail/Outlook and then sync the deletions cause they're not even ON there!!!

I am seriously tempted to just nuke the phone and start over, it's THAT bad in there!!!
 
Oh, phew! Nevermind, I figured it out! It DID crawl through GMail and add every single person I ever emailed (including some spammers!), but I figured out how to get them out of there.

In case anyone's wondering, it's menu > view > Google, and then uncheck everything except System Group: My contacts in there.

It didn't actually delete them though. I now have 1,345 contacts on my phone... I'm not happy about that, but I guess as long as I don't have to actually see them...
 
Yep, as I said, I realised that in my second post, and I just switched off displaying them in my phonebook :) Much simpler than deleting them as I might actually need to email some of these people (albeit only about 10% of them... GMail has really spoiled me!)
 
Yeah 2" once you know how, but going into your contacts and finding LITERALLY a thousand email addresses spamming the place instead of just the people you actually CALL is pretty disconcerting! :p
 
The "other" contacts from GMail shouldn't appear anyway when you're trying to enter a name while composing an SMS, because GMail only adds their email address - you need a mobile number to text them on! :p
 
...And speaking of bizarre, for some reason my phone decided that the contact entry for my local cinema should have the avatar I use in GMail chat as its contact picture!
:confused:

Something really weird is going on with this phone, I think I should just delete all my contacts and resync...
 
OK now this is getting RIDICULOUS! I had to wipe my contacts storage to resolve a "The application Google services Framework(process com.google.process.gapps) has stopped unexpectedly" error, and not only did all the "Other" contacts from GMail reappear, but I COULDN'T TURN THEM OFF! I went into the View menu in People again, and despite disabling the "Other" contacts checkbox they were still there spamming my contacts list!

I soon found out why this was so: when I synced the phone to the computer after wiping the contacts list so that I could get my Outlook contacts back, the stupid thing copied all those spammy "Other" contacts from GMail into Outlook, completely flooding my contacts list!

That wasn't even the worst of it: after importing both Outlook's and Gmail's contact lists, Android in its cheery, overly-keen, psychotic helpfulness indulged in bit of merging of contacts it deemed to be duplicates. This resulted in:
a. at least 3 contacts disappearing completely
b. several contacts being cloned between 1 and 4 times
c. dozens of contacts having bits of info from other contacts imported into them (completely unrelated ones as well - I mean why would a dude called Andrew from Leeds have an email address that reads "jennifer*****@hotmail.com"? (not a searie, starred for privacy) I mean why would Android think of merging the entries of a 60-year-old dude from Leeds with a 30-year old Swiss woman, and to do it forcibly without even prompting me if I want to? It's like a reality show about the most psychotic homicidal matchmaker in history!!!
d. At least 10 contacts (that I noticed) having their names erased, so I just have a single phone number or email address in there. In one fairly amusing example, instead of being completely erased, my cousin's name became the first line of his work address instead. All other fields from that entry have been deleted, so I just have a nameless contact with a work address that's actually his name. And another 4 copies of that entry.

The absolute worst thing is that when I plugged in my old WinMo phone in an attempt to restore my Outlook contacts list to its formerly pristine condition, it instead ****ed up my phone's contact list as well! Activesync used to have quite detailed options letting you choose whether to give primacy to the phone or the PC in case of conflict back in version 4.2, but in 4.5 they simplified those with a simple "replace item on PC/device" menu, and that just didn't give me the control I needed to restore all the entries from the phone (overwriting the screwed-up entries on the computer) and delete all the new entries).

This has COMPLETELY ruined my evening, honestly! I'm not entirely sure that it was the linked contacts thing that caused everything to go haywire and my contacts to get more tangled than a bowl of spaghetti, it could've been some snafu perpetrated by HTC Sync as well I guess, but "linked contacts" is the most likely culprit. I'm kicking myself for synchronising the phone, my Outlook contacts list was my backup, my last resort, and when I saw what was done to it I was THIS close to throwing the phone against the wall!

I'll be spending the next 3 hours trying to tidy up my Contacts list in Outlook, trying to recover anything I lost, but there's no telling how many people's details I've now lost or their phone numbers are now associated with a different contact! This has done me REAL, ACTUAL and possibly irreperable harm, and I'm seriously considering RMA'ing the device and sticking with stupid, clunky old WinMo, which has NEVER given me a problem like that in 5 years of using it! All this time, I could flash a new ROM on my old phone, knowing that everything would be in Outlook and it would be easy-peasy to restore it afterwards, or reinstall Windows knowing that all my contacts were on the phone and it'd be the work of 5' to get Outlook back up and running with a full Calendar and Contacts list - now that confidence has been ruined forever and I don't think I'll ever be able to trust Android with ANY mission-critical stuff!
 
That may be the way forwards, migrate everything to GMail, tidy it up, and then not need to bother with Outlook again. I've already set up an Exchange link between Outlook and GMail using Activesync, so all my Outlook contacts WERE also in GMail, but the magic of automation means that when the fecal matter hit the rotating blades on Android, all the damage was transferred to Outlook and from there to GMail.

I'm fairly sure it wasn't any syncing session that did it though: my prime suspect is Android's "linked contacts" thing. Even though I kept rejecting its linking suggestions, it still seems to have done it anyway!

One other possibility is my Outlook-Gmail sync. I imagine if any change were to happen on the phone, and then I synced it with both Gmail and Outlook, then Outlook would sync to Gmail as well, and that might set up a chain reaction of everything updating over and over again in a circle, which might explain why I have up to 4 copies of some contacts. Is that possible?

Does anyone know of a way I can switch the damned Linked Cotnacts thing off so that when I next sync with both Outlook and Gmail the same thing won't happen again?
 
Still haven't found out how to switch Linked Contacts off, so I've been wandering around with a phone completely empty of contacts. Anyone know how to do it?
 
Allright, there's DEFINITELY something wrong with HTC Sync! I sat and repaired my Outlook contacts list, wiped the data on the phone (DIDN'T sync with GMail) and synced it up with HTC Sync again (setting "use PC data" for conflict resolution).

- It created at least 5 duplicate contacts that I spotted, where there was definitely only one copy of each of them on the PC

- It arbitrarily renamed a few contacts (eg. "American Embassy London" in Outlook became "American London" on the phone)

- Edits in Outlook are NOT mirrored on the phone after the initial sync (tried inserting a middle initial to the names of a couple of contacts, but HTC Sync didn't echo the change)

- Deletions in Outlook are NOT mirrored on the phone (again, I tried experimentally deleting a contact after the initial sync and it just wasn't echoed)

- It again managed to screw up a couple of contacts in Outlook during the 3rd or 4th sync (deleted one person's name and stuck a completely irrelevant person's email address in the nameless entry!) - this must be "linked contacts" bull faeces again!

The fact that this is still happening when I DIDN'T sync with any other accounts except my Outlook contacts is outrageous! I'm not entirely sure if this is Android's or HTC Sync's doing, but I WANT IT TO STOP!

If anyone can help me please do! Any advice/suggestion welcomed! It is a complete dealbreaker for me that I can't sync my contacts!
 
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