Rated 2 out of 5 stars

by Firefox user 5d5b2c on Nov. 8, 2009 ·

I encountered some major problems when using this addon:
1. Thunderbird froze completely during the first sync; I had created a new address book for my Google contacts. After about an hour I decided to kill the process. On restart, I discovered that only about half of the Google contacts (220 of 420) had been transferred to Thunderbird, no changes to the Google contacts were made.
2. The add-on creates dummy email addresses ("nobody....@nowhere.invalid") for contacts without any email address. This is seemingly just a work-around for a bug in Thunderbird (see http://www.pirules.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=gContactSync+FAQs). However, it is very annoying: I can't see at one glance which email addresses are missing and when using the autocomplete function in the address bar it comes up with the "fake" addresses.
3. It creates new fields for phone numbers like Work, Mobile. Unfortunately, the phone numbers were mostly put into the wrong categories. This might be due to MoreFunctionsForAddressBook (https://nic-nac-project.org/~kaosmos/morecols-en.html), another extension that I've been using for years and that worked fine with other sync programs (e.g. MyPhoneExplorer).

I decided to uninstall the add-on immediately - maybe I'll give it another try when TB3 (with the new address book) is out. (btw I'm using TB 2.0.0.23)

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.2.9). 

by Josh Geenen (Developer) on Dec. 6, 2009 ·

1. I apologize for the freeze. Did you receive any sort of Unresponsive Script warning? If you ever try gContactSync again would you be willing to send me the first and last portions of the log (the first has basic info on Thunderbird and preferences and the last part will let me know what it was doing when it froze)?\r\n\r\n2. I\'m working on a better way of handling contacts without e-mail addresses. There is a hidden preference that allows only using this address when absolutely necessary (http://pirules.org/forum/index.php?topic=19.msg111#msg111) but I only recommend using it after I release 0.2.11.\r\n\r\n3. gContactSync adds phone number types (Home, Work, Mobile, etc.) to the existing Thunderbird fields and ignores the actual name of the phone number. This was done to allow multiple phone numbers of the same type and to include more types of phone numbers than Thunderbird allows. The issue with that is the column labels where the list of contacts is displayed still has the old labels which do not necessarily match the labels in individual contacts (See this post and the rest of the thread for more details: http://pirules.org/forum/index.php?topic=60.msg271#msg271). Version 0.3 may provide an option to use the existing fields instead of adding the new types and ignoring the column labels. This isn\'t really explained in the FAQ yet.\r\n\r\nThanks for the feedback!\r\n\r\nJosh\r\n\r\nPS: My contact information is in the \"Support\" section of the add-on description if you have more suggestions or questions.