Gmail Rough Spots

The “new” version of Gmail is pretty nice. Chat finally works in Safari 3. Contacts are way screwed. That’s okay. Gmail contacts don’t work. The idea of auto-populating contacts is interesting, but in my case, deeply flawed.

Gmail wants to treat contacts the same as e-mail. Keep everything and just use search to find it. Which, okay, that fine…until you do something like silly like use Plaxo (a service that will sync up address books).

So I decided I wanted to start fresh. I have 523 “contacts” in Gmail. I have 166 entries in my local address book. So, are those extra 357 entries really contacts? At some point I must have sent them mail. It’s very likely it was a thread started by a group I know that don’t understand the concept of mailing lists. So, every message has a To header with 35 addresses in it and everybody just hits ‘reply all.’ Some of these people even have college degrees. But, I appear to be finding a tangent in my rant.

So, tabla rasa. I’ll just nuke all the Gmail contacts and import my local address book. Right?

Wrong. First there was some issues that were completely my fault. Contacts are screwing in Safari. Okay, fire up the Fox. Firebug is mean to Gmail. Okay, disabled. Still, nothing. Not even a screwed up rendering like in Safari. Just, nothing. Ah, Better Gmail for Firefox breaks it. Disabled. Okay, select all and delete. Right? Again, you couldn’t be more wrong. Gmail will only let you delete 20 contacts at a time. The only way to select 20 contacts is to individually click 20 checkboxes.

Oh hell no. It’s frustrating because storing all those contacts for use in Gmail is fine. But, it’s my data and I do have other places where it would be useful. Having limited control is hard to deal with.