Rated 3 out of 5 stars

by Newlog on Aug. 5, 2014 ·

Hello

Some time ago I posted a review entitled “VERY DANGEROUS ADDON”, and I would be very happy if the bugs I spotted there have disappeared from latest release 1.0.

However, this is not clear from the changelog, nor from the author's web site.

So, again, did you fix:
1/ the important issue of the LOCALIZED built-in Google groups?
2/ the sync of the PRO fields?
3/ the handling of BIG address books (1000+)?

I do hope so, so please confirm.

But I am in doubt when I read you claim that the addon "never deletes more than 5 entries without asking for confirmation" while some users have seen parts or all of their AB gone...

Please remember that your users, and your potential donators, are non-tech people. DO NOT ASK THEM FOR A LOG FILE OR FOR SPECIFC TESTS. You will just scare them away.

For my part I I'll be happy to donate once the addon REALLY works.

Greetings from France

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (1.0.0). 

by Josh Geenen (Developer) on Aug. 7, 2014 ·

In the future please post comments and questions like this in the forum (preferred) or in an e-mail. This comment isn't a review, nor is it particularly helpful to me since I still don't have any details or anyone trying to decide whether to try this add-on.

1) No, because I haven't been able to recreate it and it hasn't been reported by anyone else. I use en-US, cs, de, es-ES, sv-SV, and nl localized versions of Thunderbird with unique and shared profiles without issues. Additionally, thousands of users are using the non-English localizations. If you run into it again please send me a log. If you want to see a real changelog of any open source project just find its repository and issue tracker. https://github.com/jdgeenen/gcontactsync and

2) Again, I wasn't able to recreate it. There were several bug fixes in 1.0, however, so it's possible one of those bugs affected the professional fields. If it's still broken send me a log or at least e-mail details on how to recreate the issue.

3) It can handle them, it just takes time. Try synchronizing 1000s of contacts manually...I suspect gContactSync is faster ;). Thunderbird isn't journaled so it's not easy to know what changed since the last sync (specifically what has been deleted from TB). I hope to work on an incremental sync for version 2.0 or 3.0. Remember this is a hobby, not a job, and I spend the vast majority of my spare time supporting the add-on and responding to people rather than developing it.

> But I am in doubt when I read you claim that the addon "never deletes more than 5 entries without asking for confirmation" while some users have seen parts or all of their AB gone...

It's open source, so you are free to validate my claim :) The number is configurable but it won't delete without permission. It asks once with the number of contacts it is about to delete. Unfortunately I can't control whether people actually read the dialog before clicking OK or Cancel.

> Please remember that your users, and your potential donators, are non-tech people. DO NOT ASK THEM FOR A LOG FILE OR FOR SPECIFC TESTS. You will just scare them away.

You would be surprised; many gContactSync users are highly technical and have provided me with logs and other useful information. I've heard from other developers, IT personnel, tech company owners, bloggers, etc. I agree some aren't technical, but I can usually tell whether someone is capable of sending me a log.

Also, I am definitely not in this for the money. I could make far more money in my spare time by picking up a minimum wage job. People asked for a Donate button so I added one.

Tens of thousands of people seem to think it "REALLY works", hopefully you will too. I urge you to send a log or more details on any issues you run into

Josh

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.