Does the sync with Gmail account for new My Contacts versus Suggested Contacts?

Rob, we filter out contacts that GMail has to only sync those contacts that have an email address AND at least a name or company name. This filters out all the suggested contacts that are not wanted. It's true that GMail changed the way they add new contacts to put them in the Suggested Contacts, but most users still have hundreds of unwanted contacts in their normal list from before the change - hence we still have to filter them.

Rob, thanks for your elaborate explanation. That does really help in understanding what's going on - sorry if I'm a bit slow sometimes. Please understand that there are many different scenarios and we must understand them all in order to provide a good syncing tool.

Let's make an overview of what's going on, we have three separate issues here:

1. Confusion over how contacts are added to Suggested Contacts
2. Google _used to_ add all contacts directly to your 'My Contacts', that means that existing 'My Contacts' are often still a mess.
3. Soocial should NOT sync with Google's 'Suggested Contacts'.

Number 3 is obvious and that is how we sync now. Soocial does not sync with Google's 'Suggested Contacts' - that is why ebay-girl isn't being synced. (And that is desired behaviour - reading your story, and your second bewildered reply.) So hope that clears part of the problem up.

The confusion about how contacts are added to Suggested Contacts including their name or not has to do with like you say whether or not that information is present. When you reply to an email - Google will add the contact to Suggested Contacts - usually because it's a reply there _WILL_ be a name (as you say because they'll have set it up in their mail prefs) HOWEVER there is also the scenario that you can send an email to someone just by entering their email address - WITHOUT a name. Many users do this and thus their existing Google contacts can be a mess - sometimes up to 4000 incomplete contacts. These incomplete contacts are now added to Suggested Contacts but they used to be added straight to your 'My Contacts' to the frustration of users and of course to us as Soocial as we then needed to find a work around to stop these incomplete and unwanted contacts into the whole Soocial eco-system.

However the issue is more complicated than this as Google used to add your suggest contacts like ebay girl to your contacts and Soocial had no way of distinguishing these apart from the fact that they we're often incomplete. Many GMail users still have a heap of contacts that just have an email addy and no name. These 'meager contacts' will pollute your address books and this is not desired behaviour.

We will be providing users with a lot more control over what does and doesn't get synced in the future - but for now we have to make choices as to what makes sense for most of our users.

Hope this helps you Rob and thanks again for your extensive 'bug/feature' reports.

Hi guys,

Good discussion on the suggested contacts in GMail. Currently we've implemented our own "poor mans" junk filter for Google contacts because Google doesn't allow us to distinguish between "My Contacts" and "Suggested Contacts" via de API (the mechanism Google makes available for syncing contacts). There is a bug report for this issue at http://code.google.com/p/gdata-issues... please leave your comment and that you want this implemented for Soocial. Hopefully that will encourage them to enable this for us.

Our poor mans filter currently rejects contacts that don't have a name or company defined. This works well for random email addresses like support@somedomain.com but in the case of robthecomputerguy and "ebay girl" it fails because the name "ebay girl" is defined for that contact, enabling it to pass through our filter.

Our best bet for fixing this issue is to gently encourage Google to implement access to "My Contacts" via the API.

Thanks for your interest in Soocial and the GMail sync, let us know what your thoughts are on this issue and how we can make Soocial better.

Hi Rob,

Thanks for your answer and your passionate distaste of the auto-added contacts, I'd appreciate such a passionate post over at the google site too : )

Filtering what contacts are to be synced where is something we'll be working on in the coming few weeks, please do not refrain from speaking your mind on any of these issues.

Gmail did release a new version of the API. It means that we need to reprogram the way we interact with Gmail. So Gmail made it possible finally! Now ewe just need some time to make use of it. We will keep you posted here.