Not all contacts have icons and get synched

Hey ya’ll,

I am SO happy there’s a plaxo for address book now. With the Entourage update that came today, it’s actually possible to use Plaxo with Entourage now, albeit a bit of a roundabout way (but not nearly as roundabout as it used to be!).

I installed the toolbar today after clearing out all my online contacts. Everything there was really old with people I didn’t want to keep. After clearing everything online, I used to the address book plaxo toolbar to request updates of all of my contacts. Everything in the toolbar installed fine and I can see the sidebar with no problem.

As I’ve gotten update requests in, however, I seem to be having some difficulties actually getting the updated information to sync to address book. Several of my contacts have updated their information (I know because I’ve gotten update emails with the new information) but this information isn’t actually getting added to address book, even after I tell it to “sync now.” I have the preference set to sync automatically, but even after waiting for over an hour the auto sync hasn’t changed information.

One thing that I did notice is that not all of the contact card icons changed. Some contact card icons were the blue this person is already a member one, some of them were the green ones that meant updated info, some were the yellow icon with an arrow, and some were the bounced email icon. Most of the cards, however, don’t have any icon at all! The cards which don’t have the icons are not getting updated, which cards that do have the icons have been changed.

I tried uninstalling the toolbar and then reinstalling, but when I opened AB the same contacts had icons but no one else did. I'm running the latest version of Tiger on a PowerBook G4.

Thoughts?

Oh, one more odd behavior. Before I uninstalled and reinstalled, if I was looking at a contact that had been updated but didn't have an icon, the updates would be listed in the plaxo box under history, just not reflected in AB.

After the reinstall, I don't get any data under the history bar for contacts with icons or contacts without.

Thought that might be helpful. I dunno.

Hi...thanks for providing such good detail of the problems you're experiencing. There is good news and bad news. The bad news is that this is a real bug. The good news is that all the symptoms you describe are based off of the same one problem. The good news/bad news is that the fix will come with an update to our servers - so while we have identified the problem, we can't roll out a quick patch but we'll probably have this fixed in the near term (probably several weeks) and you won't need a new version of Plaxo for Mac to get the benefit of the fix.

Not to annoy you with more good new / bad news, but...

There is a bit of a workaround that isn't too painful that you can use to mitigate the problem.

If you are finding certain contacts that don't show the correct Plaxo icon, you can tickle the contacts by adding them to a group and then selecting Sync Now. Once the sync is complete, you should see all the correct icons/info. That's the good news.

The bad news part is that there is a bug in the current release of Plaxo for Mac pertaining to Groups - specifically, if you delete a Group with contacts in it from within Address Book, that change will not be sent to your Plaxo Universal Address Book. This problem can be avoided by first removing all contacts from the Group prior to deleting it. This bug - dealing with the Group changes has already been fixed and will be a part of the next upgrade to Plaxo for Mac.

If you find problems like this, please don't hesitate to write in to beta-mac@plaxo.com. As we work towards the 1.0 release we definitely want to have issues like this resolved. Alerting us when you see problems like this goes a long way!

Wow - thanks for the great reply!

I have noticed this - in case you'd like a little more info. Over the last 12 hours or so I was sleeping/busy and didn't do anything but updates rolled in. When I opened address book this morning, the icons hadn't really changed, BUT some people had duplicate contact cards, one without an icon and holding my old information, and one with a green icon and the new information. Yay. A simple delete of the old card is sufficient. Thanks for the tip on the groups to get some of these other icons changed. This is a great beta and I look forward to the final release!