Ask TUAW: how to sync between Address Book and Gmail

Hawk Wings has an interesting roundup post covering a number of individuals who are dumping Apple's Mail in the name of Gmail for various reasons. While I've been experimenting with the same thing over the last couple of weeks, I've run into a hangup that I felt worthy of an Ask TUAW post. Since more and more of us are adopting web services for daily operations, I thought y'all might have some thoughts on my situation: I love web services, especially ones like Gmail, but now that I own a Motorola RAZR that can sync contacts and events with OS X, I'm on the hunt for an easy way to keep my contacts synchronized between Address Book and Gmail. I know there are basic export apps that are handy for that initial dump from Address Book to Gmail, but I don't know if using that same method a second time will simply double-up all my Gmail contacts. A two-way solution would be ideal, allowing Address Book, Gmail and my RAZR to dance in perfect geeky harmony.

So what say you, TUAW readers? Have any of you found a way to keep all this software in sync?

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Hawk Wings has an interesting roundup post covering a number of individuals who are dumping Apple's Mail in the name of Gmail for various...

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PWG

I don't mean to be smug, but if you go with dot mac, you get your online addresses, your bookmarks (which you can sync from other browsers using bookit), & web email; all synced. I use mine with Mailsmith without much cause for complaint.

January 27 2006 at 7:22 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Race Proffitt

I too have not found a way to sync gmail and address book. However I have been working on using Mozilla's Thunderbird email client for Mac, which has a plugin for Plaxo. Plaxo will keep your contacts in sync and if someone updates their own contact in Outlook, you'll end up getting the update.

Keeping contacts and calendar in sync seems to be a very difficult task since no one has an all-in-one solution. My wife and I have Macs at home, but use Windows machines at work. So,if a company has a way to sync my contacts & calendar between Mac Address Book & iCal, Windows Outlook, and online services like Yahoo and GMail, I would pay money for that service.

January 13 2006 at 3:19 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Carl Struyk

I'm still waiting for Gmail to offer a way to store your contacts in such a way that EVERYONE you email doesn't clutter up your contact list! Maybe allow your important contacts to be marked with a star (like the emails) so that you can occasionally delete all the non-starred contacts (meaning your important contacts are the only ones left).

January 03 2006 at 11:25 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Berko

Yahoo! has Intellisync, but it's Windows only. I check on it every once in a while to see if there is a Mac version out, but as of yet, there hasn't been. Yahoo!, are you listening? iSync supports SyncML. It shouldn't be that hard to release an iSync plugin. And, no, so far I haven't found any way to sync Gmail and Address Book. Hell, Gmail just started supporting contact exporting. Before that, if I added a contact in Gmail, it had to be entered manually in Address Book. Also, be careful importing your contacts into Gmail. When I did mine, addresses and phone numbers didn't come across correctly.

January 02 2006 at 10:28 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Scott-O-Rama

Forget Gmail. Yahoo's new beta kicks its butt. So that begs the question, does anyone know how to sync Address Book and Yahoo! Contacts? What about iCal and Yahoo! Calendar?

January 02 2006 at 1:00 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Rhapsody

Re-importing CSV file into Gmail do not double up your contacts according to my experience.

January 02 2006 at 10:21 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply