Clumsy. Not overly logical. Imported my entire address book without discerning that email addresses are email addresses. Even when I use contacts where I have manually re-entered email addresses properly and saved them, I Compose and click on Contacts and chose a name. Fine.
Then I want add other names. How? I click another name, and another NEW email is generated !??
Madness. Help !!
Cartooniverse
Just go to “compose,” get into the “to” field and start typing. Gmail will toss up a list of all possible contacts that match what you’re typing, and as you go along will prioritize them in the order that you most use them. For example, when I type a J my daughter’s address always comes up first because I email her more often than the other 20-30 contacts that start with J. Gmail is very intuitive, it will learn your preferences, just relax and go with it. Don’t overthink anything–and you don’t really have to formally add info to contacts at all, it will remember everybody you’ve ever emailed. Amazing, really, I’ve been using it for a couple years now and everything else seems clunky and stupid. Except Thunderbird, that’s still my preference for all my email accounts that aren’t Gmail.
Gmail is many things, but “intuitive” is not one of them. It bucks nearly every email convention created in the last two decades. The very opposite of untuitive.
And yet most people, myself included, have no trouble jumping right in and figuring out how to do everything on the fly. Hence: intuitive.
Gmail is intuitive for the geek crowd that loves messing with stuff like that (myself included), but Gmail is terrible for a casual computer user weaned on a more traditional email interface like Yahoo or Hotmail.
You may be looking for conventional versus unconventional. If something’s intuitive, you can figure out how to use it without being trained or reading instructions. Knowing how something works because you’ve used stuff like it before doesn’t make that thing intuitive.
Oh, now. I’m as intuitive as the next Doper. However, when I tell the software to Import my entire address book from Mac mail, and it does so WITHOUT recognizing all email addresses as hyperlinks to be used for addressing emails, that is an issue.
ONLY the few folks who have replied so far to my new Gmail account appear in the Contacts as people with “active” email addresses. All of the other almost 1,600 contacts show the email address jammed in as a phone # or address line of info.
THAT is not intuitive. That’s bullshit, ok? I am not about to go through and manually re-insert each individual email address by using the handy dandy “Edit” feature of Contacts under Gmail.
I exported a V-Card. I imported a V-Card. It seemed to work. It took FOREVER ( read: 5-10 seconds ) for a single V-Card to be imported. I am supposed to believe that if I wipe out my last attempt at building a Contacts list, and try to export my entire address book as V-Cards, that Gmail won’t take a few days nonstop, uploading all of those V-Cards??
:rolleyes:
Gee, sounds like you should demand a refund.
I’m looking for practical solutions please.
How does one export from Mac Address Book, or for that matter Palm OS Address Book, into gmail contacts and retain email coding?
Gmail? Intuitive? I’m trying to delete the last load attempt of the Contacts list. The thing is CRAWLING- because, of course, the data is not stored on my machine. I keep getting this warning:
" A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete. "
You’d think I was using a Windows machine, with bullshit like this… but I’m not.
These instructions say to export your contacts as a CSV file, then import into Gmail (they’re very old, so the information may be irrelevant and out of date now). Having no way to try it myself, all I can do is link you to it and hope that it works for you.
The gmail instructions for import include a link to a program specifically for exporting addresses from Apple’s Address Book into a format gmail understands.
Oh, Gmail itself suggests the A to G tool. Have you tried it?
From that site:
A to G will bring over your contacts’ phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, companies, job titles and notes so that you can have info you need wherever you have Gmail.
I saw that. I have not tried A to G because my Palm Address book is more current. However, I am looking to find a way to export Palm in the format gmail wants.
Googling for “palm address csv mac os x”:
Palm Desktop
To export a CSV file from Palm Desktop:
Open Palm Desktop
Display your contact list by clicking the “Addresses” icon on the lefthand side of the screen
Select “Export” from the “File” menu
When the dialog box opens, enter a name for the file you are creating in the “File name:” field; select “Comma Separated” in the “Export Type” pulldown menu; be sure to select the “All” radio button from the two “Range:” radio buttons
A second dialog box “Specify Export Fields” opens. Leave all of the checkboxes checked, and click “OK”
[sub]disclaimer: instructions not necessarily mac specific, probably ok[/sub]
Thank you drewbert. Attempting now. I think I didn’t chose " vcard" but instead “tab and return” before. Ach.
The little quirk, which is insurmountable according to the Palm people on the phone, is that you cannot synch using a Palm device with a Mac without dealing with duplications. When using Windows, you can tell it not to synch dupes. With a Mac, apparently this is a glitch they’re “working on”.
My list of 1,600 names is around 5,400 right now. 
It seems to have imported properly- but now I have several groups of contacts. Massive ones, but what do I care. I’m trying to compose test emails.
I know my nephew is in there. I see him. I know the name he’s listed under. When I open up a new blank email and hit " to", and type in his name, nothing comes up.
AND- very maddening, if I try to write the COUNTERINTUITIVE way, by finding his name in my Contacts list, his email address does NOT come up. Instead, on the right, it says, " 2 contacts selected, with a blue hyperlink that instead of showing HIS email address, says instead, " email"… and when I click it, nothing happens.
More b.s.
More mystery.
And… EVERY name does not show the email address, but instead shows what I just wrote above.
Intuitive? Please. I now have thousands of mis-imported contacts that I must delete- ONLY 500 at a time, as per Gmail limitations, and then try to figure out how to use A to G to do this- WITH an older version of my contacts.
As I said, b.s.
This WOULD be funny, except for the “script” issues. I now have two groups of contacts, totalling over 12,000 contacts due to the duplication issue. I have to delete them, 500 at a time, to get back to zero.
Meanwhile, the gmail software does not recognize the Vcards I imported properly.
Which means… that I am stuck trying the A to G way, with an out of date address book.
Beyond b.s.
Well, A to G worked flawlessly. It is to me to figure out WHICH contacts from Palm need to be dragged in or manually imported. Not a great way to be, but at least I no longer have 12,000 contacts.
Thank you for the guidance and for giving me the straight dope on it. I STILL think it’s a bit clunky. That may change in time. For example, where does it say what the file size limit is? I tried to send a photo that was 1.2 megs, and it failed.