Rated 3 out of 5 stars

by William Ely on Dec. 11, 2009 ·

This plugin adds nonsense email addresses to contacts that don't have one. Is that really necessary? I just want to sync my contacts, not add garbage to them. I was using the "Google Contacts" plug-in before and it was awesome, but not compatible with 3.0 :(

If this serious issue was fixed, the plug-in would be good.

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.2.10). 

by Josh Geenen (Developer) on Jan. 1, 2010 ·

Hello,

gContactSync uses mailing lists to synchronize the Groups that you have through Google Contacts (My Contacts, Family, Friends, Coworkers, etc.) by default. Mailing lists in Thunderbird were only intended to be used for contacts with unique e-mail addresses. If you add contacts to a mailing list without an e-mail address or with an e-mail address that is already contained in the list then the mailing list can essentially break and the Address Book will no longer function well enough to be synchronized.

gContactSync adds fake e-mail addresses to avoid breaking mailing lists. Starting with version 0.2.11 (added after your review) these fake e-mail addresses only when necessary. Previous versions added them to every contact without an e-mail address because I wanted to ensure that gContactSync wouldn't break any more mailing lists. This changed in 0.2.11 because I believe I found a way to add an e-mail address to contacts in a mailing list before they are added using Thunderbird or gContactSync.

If you upgrade to at least 0.2.11 and double-click on a contact to edit it the e-mail address will not appear there. Click OK and the fake address will only be added if it is necessary (only when it is in a mailing list).

Regards,

Josh

PS: I filed a bug report about blank e-mail addresses and mailing lists here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=492695