Google Nonsense

Despite my earlier euphoria over getting my contacts to sync from Thunderbird to Gmail, and thence to Blackberry, I discovered that not all the info would sync. Minor things, like the CITY! and the STATE! wouldn't sync when trying to import csv files into Gmail. oy

Googling this issue revealed that many poor souls suffered the same lot as I, but I didn't find any good solutions. There were many suggestions for editing the top line of the exported csv file from Thunderbird, but while this could convert the display name to the name, it didn't address (hah hah) the city and state issue.

I tried editing the top line manually several times, each time deleting all my gmail contacts and re-importing, but nothing worked. Gmail had some secret sequence it was looking for, but was mum on the details.

As a last resort, I tried something else. I imported all my contacts from Thunderbird into Windows Address Book, carefully mapping the fields, and that worked. Then I exported a csv from WAB and imported that into Gmail. It worked! huzzah

The sequence that WAB exported was this:
First Name,Last Name,Name,E-mail Address,Home Street,Home City,Home Postal Code,Home State,Home Country/Region,Home Phone,Business Street,Business City,Business Postal Code,Business State,Business Country/Region,Business Phone,Company,Job Title

That seems to be a field mapping that Gmail can digest. What a pain. But at least I addressed this issue of great import.


Posted by Dave    Blog Tag: Chatter
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