Saturday, January 17, 2009

If You Have no Contacts...

Thanks to everyone that reported they had no contacts. A pattern is emerging. Almost all the users reporting lack of contacts have the same problem, which in fact isn't a new problem nor is it related to the recent reliability issues. This blog article has the details. If you have a lack of contacts, or indeed any problem, please log into our web site and check your account status first (if you see a red light that indicates a problem that needs to be fixed), then your sync status. These pages 'understand' a large number of known support issues and will often display information on how to fix the problem you have.

Update: thanks to a very helpful user who was willing to allow us to use his account for debugging, we found an additional problem with Google contact sync last night. Users with larger numbers of contacts should benefit from the fix which is now live on the production service.

40 comments:

Chris said...

Thanks for this post. I am loving the new color-coded calendars, but I had lost all of my contacts. It turns out that after going through the process outlined in this post I was able to figure out that my problem was that Nuevasync was having problems reading the Google Contacts header file. By going into my account and clicking on the "setup" option under Contacts, I was able to re-request account access to Google which solved the problem. It's good to have my contact info back! Hope this helps some you guys.

Hernán said...

Haven't you said before in http://nuevasync.blogspot.com/2009/01/service-status.html that the status page always reports OK?

jmvidal said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
jmvidal said...

Ok, the "sync status" error message was transient. That page now shows:

Sync Status Report

iPhone (ID: Appl83834DBJY7K), sync status is: OK
(data was last transfered 1 minute ago)

But I still have no contacts.

jmvidal said...

And, now the sync status is back showing the error. I did nothing in the meantime, just left the iphone running contacts.

fallout said...

I've had a similar issue, the solution was to add a contact on the iPhone, after adding it it would show for a bit, then disappear and immediately my google contacts would sync. Tried it multiple times, worked every time.

So try adding one contact (contents of it do not matter), and wait, then add another if still not working.

jmvidal said...

Thanks. But, it did not work for me. I've added 3 contacts all of which promptly disappeared but 10mins later no contacts have been downloaded.

Matt said...

I had no contacts too but I found out why - it may affect some users out there. I have a google APPS account, BUT I also have a regular google account for like reader and blogger, etc...because your apps one for whatever reason doesn't work with those - well I was signed into my apps acct and also my reader account (2 diff accts) and when I went to nuevasync account and changed my setting to reauthorize contacts in gmail...it actually asked for permission but it was asking for my reader acct which I didnt notice and that gmail acct has 0 contacts and is not set up...as soon as I logged out of reader and any other non apps account google programs, I reauthorized, granted access and within 2 minutes my contacts were back! I hope this helps some...

Ben Dalton said...

I too have no contacts showing up on my iPhone. The Sync Status page is returning an error for me as well.

Help please! :-)

jmvidal said...

Matt: interesting.

I do have a couple of blogger accounts for which I got domain names. When one does this google automatically sets up google apps for those domains.

But, as far as I can tell I am not logged in to the google apps. That is, when I visit mail.jose-vidal.com (the mail account for my blog, which I have never used) I get the login prompt asking me to log in.

Maybe this info will help?

Ben Dalton said...

Update: I re-connected my google account to my nuevasync account and the Sync Status now shows that everything is good (green).

I still don't have contacts on my phone... crossing my fingers that they load now.

Jaime said...

I would like to suggest to raise up the maximum number of calendars to 10, so we make can make use of each color for 2 calendars. The way it is now we can "hack" 2 reds, 2 oranges and 2 blues, but no 2 greens or 2 purples.

Thanks for your efforts and sorry to be off topic here.

Hernán said...

I had the same problem (no contacts) but they started to load again after I did the 'request account access' again.
The status page always reports OK either before, when it cleaned all the contacts or now, after the iPhone began syncing contacts again.

Erling said...

Figured it out (at least this worked for me):
1. Export all your Google contacts as a Google CSV file
2. Delete all your Google contacts
3. Import the CSV file you exported.

Suddenly everything worked fine.

jmvidal said...

Hmmm, exporting to .csv would mean losing all my photos.

jk said...

I think I found the error:

I use the partnerpages from google mail for my own email-domain.

If I want to authenticate nuevasync contacts there is in the delivered internet adress no partnerpage given to google.

clarkv said...

All my contacts have dissapears from my iphone AND also from my gmail account. Will they ever come back? Is that even possible? Are they cached on your server somewhere?

Montgomery said...

Contacts disappeared from iPhone, but your "request access" procedure seems to have worked.

Thank you!

Mikalee said...

My contacts seem to come and go on a whim for the last 6 days or so. I've tried everything you've suggested without any luck. When my contacts do come back it's never a result of my actions. Please help!

Thanks for all your great work.

jk said...
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jk said...

I´m afraid it´s the same on my service. I thought I found the problem but I have still no contacts on my iphone.

Unknown said...

Hiya

I have lost my contacts as an article describes and I used the link to go to the web site to take corrective action.

However I cannot load the web site www.nuevasync.com and it times out - on several computers.

This means I cannot take corrective action to sort out the missing contacts on my iPhone.

Can you advise please??

Cheers

Steve B

jk said...

I imported my google contacts to plaxo. Then I switched at nuevasync website from google contacts to plaxo contacts and the sync to my iphone works. Now I have at least my contacts back.

Ben Dalton said...

I am happy to report that, after i re-connected my google account for contacts, my contacts have finally synced.

I did go onto my device and toggle off/on contact syncing.

A few hours later, my contacts were back.

I would suggest trying to do that, and then maybe adding a contact to your google contacts... then waiting.... patiently.

Good luck everyone who is still having issues. I'm SOOO glad that my contacts are syncing again.

Thanks for the great service!

Anonymous said...

i tried "fallout"'s suggestion, it worked for 50 contacts for a 2 minutes than everything disappeared again, back to no contacts - also, no calendar events before Jan 1 now ... oh well, wait and see i suppose - is there any other way of getting google calendar events on to your iphone over the air?

emsguy said...

I am also having problems. I had no problems a few days ago, now I have no calendar OR contacts. I had two green lights on the status page earlier tonight, now my contacts are green and my calendar is red. Something about a token not valid. I tried everything the blog said to do and still no luck. Hope you guys can get this fixed.

Unknown said...

Color calendars have been working since Saturday for me. And now I finally have contacts again! I was about to give up. My steps: I reauthorized google, I turned contact pushing off and then on again, then I added a contact on the iphone. Then I waited an hour. In that period my iphone sent about 50kb and downloaded 1.1Mb. I have lots of contacts with pictures. I am using the 3G network only, no wi-fi. I had done all those steps before at one point or another over the last few days, but not in that order. Good luck getting your contacts back and thanks to nuevasync for the service.

emsguy said...

Now I have two green lights, and still no contacts or calendar.

Unknown said...

Since getting switched to multi cals, I have had no issues...until this morning. Today, my calendars are working fine but I now have no contacts, either on my iPhone or in Google.

My Nuevasync status indicators are both green which makes sense since I assume their syncing is working. It's just that Google has nothing to sync. This appears to be a Google problem.

Since I never completely trust web based account storage, I have a recent back up of my contacts...thankfully!

Anonymous said...

Can I make a suggestion for the next enhancement? Can you fix the field mapping issue, where the City and State on Google Contacts is being mapped to the second Address line on the iPhone?

emsguy said...

Answer to solve this problem::

I just found out that gmail has reorganized their contacts place under gmail. Nuevasync is syncing just fine, however, if you are not seeing all of your contacts here is what you need to do. Login to your gmail acccount, click on contacts. Nuevasync is only syncing contacts that are located under your "my contacts" Not most contacted, friends, family, etc....JUST "my contacts". So what you neeed to do is click on your contacts you want to sync, and then click on move to "my contacts" button and then sync. Your contacts will now show up!

David Boreham said...

@Clark Valberg: contacts vanishing from Google is very strange. It's hard to imagine how our service could do that unless you actually deleted every contact by hand on the device (which obviously you didn't). We've searched the support tickets and can't find one that looks like it's yours. Can you submit a ticket please with a subject that will let us know who you are. Thanks.

David Boreham said...

@Ballmer (sir!): your description of the contact group behavior doesn't match what we expect nor what we see in testing. We expect all contacts in all groups to show up in the 'My Contacts' metagroup, and to get synced. However, using Google's API it is possible to make contacts that are marked as being in a specific group, but not included in 'My Contacts'. Is it possible that your contacts were made by an import tool that did that ?

aggieben said...

Is there any further status on google contacts? I still don't have mine? It's been weeks for me without any contacts at all due to "bad data in my google account" and I still don't know what the bad data is.

You said before you were working on a feature to tell us which contact(s) had the bad data. Any ETA on that?

Anonymous said...

Aggiebien
Export your google contacts. Erase all of them (if you have more than 500 it is best to use the older version of google by clicking that link in the upper right hand corner). Than reimport and you should be fine.

David Boreham said...

We're still investigating some missing contact reports. At least a few of the remaining ones have turned out to be people who had a Google auth token for a different Google account than they expected (and one that contained no contacts). So check for that if you're contactless. There is also a Google 'bad data' problem that a few users have, which should show up as an error in the sync status page. The other un-diagnosed missing contact users are being investigated still.

aggieben said...

@RRM: I already did that once, two weeks ago, and it didn't work. It was a major pain, and I'm hesitant to do it again.

David said they were working on a feature in the sync status page that would indicate further details about the bad data (which contact had the bad data, what the bad data was, or something. he didn't say exactly).

I've now switched to iTunes to keep my google contacts in sync. I'd love to go back to getting them over the air through nuevasync, but it just isn't working and i've been 3 weeks with no contacts in my phone; I just can't keep going like that.

Carter said...

@aggieben: Ditto to that. I love Nuevasync, but I've been without contacts for too long. I just can't deal with it anymore so I'm switching back to syncing via iTunes.

David Boreham said...

We found one remaining cause for lack of contacts tonight. Google had changed the semantics for their photo data slightly. The result was that we tried to fetch a photo for every contact, regardless of whether there was one or not. Strictly speaking the code worked, but the extra round trips to Google made the sync process longer and if you had a large number of contacts it was long enough to essentially never succeed. This bug was fixed a few hours ago.

Unknown said...

I've got a new issue for you guys! I had about 800 contacts in gmail and decided to delete all but 171 to sync with my iphone. Went well... really well. Then a few hours later, the contacts were mysteriously back in gmail. I repeated to delete them in gmail back down to my lucky 171. Today, they're baaaaack! It should be noted that Nueva is syncing like a champ though. Is this Nueva syncing ghost contacts or is it Gmail not knowing when i delete them? I have decided to shut off contacts on the phone, wait a while. Delete contacts from gmail. Wait a while. Then enable sync. See if that helps. If you don't hear from me again, assume that it worked.