Deleted contacts will not go away (nor send birthday gifts)

Hi Stefan,

I setup a Mac, and my phone, and synced. I then saw on my mobile that I had a lot of contacts of which I only had an email addy. Lots of them seemed to be newsletter addresses that either got into Address Book because I stamped them 'not spam' in Mail, or I had some glorious aha-moment and thought that was a good way to keep them from being handled as spam.

But however. I wanted them out. Also I once .mac synced from a temporarily computer, thus adding all contacts from Jetta. And I had lots of addresses from old clients, and contacct persons at companies I no longer work with. So, lots of things to throw away.
And, to top things off, phone and Mac addresses were partly merged (with shiny codes in the 'notes' section of Address Book indicating the origin of the addresses), but not all, because I tend to not use peoples last name in my phone. Well, tended. I now use Soocial, so it comes naturally :-)

Basic information to add to the confusion and the length of this response: I work on two Mac compuers (work and working-at-home) and I also connected to my Gmail account, in which I imported a file containig all of my Address Book contacts earlier.

I wanted to start clean. You can imagine that, with 600+ contacts, most of them useless (what do I need emailaddresses of people I do not know).

1. I cleaned up Address Book
2. merged duplicate people that were named differently but are 1 person
3. made all phone numbers the same international formatting
4. deleted lots of duplicate content that went into wrong boxes (comming from my Sony Ericsson I guess)

(I synced and saw in my Soocial pref pane ca. 645 contacts were exported, which was strange, I only had 170. Proceeded with caution.)

5. exported 1 vCard of the new improved Address Book (170 contacts)

6. removed Work computer from Soocial account (because it was switched off, possibly pushing old information from the backup, I imagined)
7. deleted all contacts on Soocial
8. deleted all contacts on Gmail
9. deleted all contacts on Sony Ericsson
10. unchecked the box Contact Information in my .mac synchronisation prefs

11. Hit 'Sync now'

Voila. 701 contacts were sent.

The individual numbers are right, but I expected to read 170. Not 701.

I now switched off the synchronising.
I even emptied my Address Book and replaced it with the .vcf file.
Uploaded that .vcf file to Soocial
Synced my phone, so I can still use Twitter, MobyPicture and can theoretically call people.

I removed gmail (which felt kind of superstitious btw), but that contact list is empty, so that can not be the source of the address from beyond.

I suspect, because the Soocial pref pane clearly states that 701 contacts were sent, the source of the problem/challenge, is the information that Soocial uses for it's information.

In user/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Metadata are also just 170 addresses, not more.

I just tried again. Now it reads '174 contacts were received and 623 contacts were sent'. The strange thing is, my Address Book stays the same. The 170 that I want to be there are still all there is. But on Soocial, I now have 699 contacts. With some duplicates where information on cards I removed, shows up in the duplicate version...
BUT. I saw that Gmail also contained 500+ contacts. I deleted them again.
And uploaded my .vcf file to Soocial.com again. And switched of synchronising.

Hope this helps.
I know it is a lot, but I think it boils down to the source of the contacts on my Mac.

Hope to hear from you!

Lots of addresses are people I do not remember. That does not count as ex-girlfriend, does it?

Lots of them have male names too.

Hi Daniel,

I am not in a hurry when you guys are working your arses off (or at least are able to create that impression), so a day or two are not too big a while.

I trashed all contacts in Gmail, the sync went well.
I unticked the 'contacts' box for syncing via .Mac, because of the two Mac station I work on, and not being able to clean the one in Rotterdam.
I just did that and will sync via Soocial now.

Theoretically the data of the 600+ list of 'contacts' (including whitelisted newsletters I think) can not exist anymore somewhere.
I will wait for what happens here (I think I will get the contacts from Soocial), and tonight see if turning on the pref pane at home plucks the old data from somewhere...

I will get back after these exciting steps. I presume it must work then, if the Soocial pref pane gets its data from the Addressbook file, because there are just the 170something contacts I want.

We will see!

Yesterday evening I forgot. Tonight will be the night.

I thought I fixed it with the deleting the contacts from ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.AddressBook but the pref pane still exports 700 contacts that I can not find anywhere on my system. Can you tell me the source the Soocial bridge uses? I want to delete everything that could interfere and reimport only the 170 contacts that really matter (and still not send me birthday gifts, but maybe that's because it is actually not my birthday).

Imagine this: I removed all connections on Soocial.com, deleted all contacts there AND emptied my Addressbook.

Pushed the 'sync now' button in the pref pane. Presto. 701 contacts were exported. Where do they come from. I cannot find any location on my computer...

Hi Ruud,

When Soocial sync the Addressbook on OSX with Soocial there are actually two syncs involved:

AddressBook <-> SyncServices <-> Soocial

If you delete stuff in Address Book and the changes do not sync to Soocial, I suspect there is something wrong with the sync between AB and SyncServices. You can reset SyncServices here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1627?lo...

Also an explaination on the count of "contacts sent": We count deletes as a "sent contact", too, not only added or modified contacts. This may explain the weird counts.

At last I have found the source of the ghost contacts, they were somewhere in the cache part of the library and where indeed connected to SyncServices...

Soocial now works as expected. Thanks for your elaboration!

Greetings,
Ruud