Whenever you send someone an email using Gmail, Google helpfully adds that person to your Suggested Contacts group in Google Contacts. But no one wants all of those email addresses cluttering his Address Book. Until now there's been no way for Spanning Sync to prevent Suggested Contacts from syncing.
Happily, one of the new features in GData v2 allows us to do just that, and we've just rolled out support for it. Since we added contact sync this has been the feature most requested by our users, so we're very pleased to be able to deliver it. The changes were all made server-side, so there's no need to update Spanning Sync on your Mac.
If you have existing suggested contacts in your Address Book and they're still listed as Suggested Contacts in Google, here's how to get rid of them for good:
- Open Google Contacts
- Select the "Suggested Contacts" group
- Click Select All
- Click "Delete Contacts"
- Sync
The contacts will be deleted in both Google Contacts and Address Book. As James Byers points out in the comments, you might want to peruse your Suggested Contacts before deleting all of them. That way you can move any you want to keep into My Contacts first.
After performing this procedure, if a contact is suggested again by Google it won't be synchronized unless you move it to "My Contacts".
Please let us know if you have any questions or run into any problems.
I had never used Contact sync before because of this. Now I have it happily syncing away. Thanks!
Posted by: scrooks | December 19, 2008 at 05:13 PM
It's a good idea to at browse through your Suggested Contacts before deleting them. I had a few hundred, and as a result of various synching schemes and use of Google Talk, a dozen or two were contacts I definitely wanted to keep. Once I moved them into My Contacts, all was well.
Posted by: James Byers | December 20, 2008 at 07:34 PM