Rated 1 out of 5 stars

by Newlog on April 18, 2014 ·

Regrettably, and despite continuous and obviously sincere efforts from its author, this addon proves VERY DANGEROUS.
Especially for non-English TB versions.

In short; it can completely ruin your ABs, both in Google Contacts and Thunderbird.

Thunderbird version
24.4.0 French

Tested addon versions
both stable 03.36 and release candidate 4.x

Google Contacts configuration
– French version
– built-in groups Family, Coworkers, Friends, etc. automatically localized to Famille, Collègues, Amis, etc. in Google
– custom groups created (in French): Musique, Voyages, etc.
– no Google circles
– all groups populated
– over 1000 contacts

Report
– the same happened with the "stable" adn "release candidate" versions.
– groups become duplicated in TB, with sometimes the French and the English name
– sync between First name, Last Name, Displayed name is not reliable, especially when drag & dropping from another ABs
– sync of Pro fields (Company, etc.) is not working
– eventually one has to restore the TB back-up (abook.map) and the Google backup (reload contacts from an early date).

For non-tech people, this can lead to a disaster.

Please make thorough tests before publishing, or withraw addon!

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.3.6). 

by Josh Geenen (Developer) on June 1, 2014 ·

First of all, thanks for trying the add-on. Please keep in mind this is a free add-on and has to deal with two constantly changing APIs that don't always work correctly (especially mailing lists in TB, search bugzilla if you don't believe me ;)). I test it fairly thoroughly but as this is a hobby rather than a job I don't have 40+ hours a week to test every localization and TB release. I tried several localizations in 0.3 and didn't recreate the problem you saw. Please send me a log if you can recreate it.

Drag and drop is implemented by Thunderbird, not gContactSync. It doesn't always work, and doesn't prevent you from dragging a contact with an e-mail address into a mailing list, which results in a duplicate contact (sort of) and potentially breaks the parent address book. If you had read the add-on description before using it you may have noticed the following warning:

"*Important*
NOTE: Mailing lists are buggy, but gContactSync tries to work around these bugs whenever possible. The fake e-mail addresses nobody...@nowhere.invalid are necessary to prevent bugs in mailing lists and are only stored in Thunderbird (they'll never make it to Google). It is best to drag contacts into the main address book and add them to groups from Google's interface."

You can safely drag and drop from another AB, but only into the parent AB. Use Google to add contacts to groups or just synchronize each group with a separate AB.

Google's API is not localized so as far as gContactSync is concerned those system groups' names are "Family, Coworkers, Friends, and My Contacts"


Are you sure the professional fields aren't synchronizing? Google recently moved where they are displayed to right under the contact's name.