Getting Outlook to export Exchange contacts as vCards (vcf) with proper email addresses for use in macOS

In 2009 I wrote about how it was getting harder to move contact information out of Outlook into something else (like macOS Contacts). I wrote about some options, but that's not what I do now.

Here's what I do (tested in Mojave, which I'm still using because Aperture):

1. Create a simple list Contacts view. I usually only want people so I sort by last name. In a few cases last name of people is blank so I fix that.
2. Now create an empty email. Drag Contacts from Outlook's view into the email body. It has to be to the email, dragging to desktop creates a .msg file. It might fail if you do too many so I distribute 300-400 contacts across 4 separate emails. Outlook creates a vCard file as an attachment. It resolves the email too, so instead of an Outlook x400 (?) you get a proper email address.
3. Send the email to your Mac
4. On the Mac download all attachments. They show as VCF files and macOS renders them quite well.  If they have photos the photos show within the card icon. Spotlight indexes them all. You don't even need to bother with dropping them into Contacts (though that's easy to do, you can drop them into your Contacts Groups (folders)).

It's pretty easy if you know the trick. I've not seen it described anywhere else but I'm sure others know it.

ToDo apps: Microsoft's solution

I've used Appigo's ToDo app for about 12 years (with Toodledo at first). It's had problems over the years, but in general it's been a good subscription choice. There's a fairly hard data lock (maybe SQLite?) but manual reentry is feasible albeit annoying.

Lately, however, ToDo has been more ragged. A recent server side change induced a date bug (time zone?) that in turn showed me I was using a macOS app last updated in 2016. It appears to have been abandoned on the Mac App Store. When I went to Twitter I found Appigo's account was closed years ago for violating TOS. Eventually I found I could download a current version of their other App Store app from their web site.

At the moment the app is more or less working again, though parts of the macOS app UI are kind of weird. I figure there was some violent ownership transition with lost dev passwords in Appigo's history (maybe they got ransomwared?).

I decided to go shopping again. I'm looking at:

• Apple Reminders: hard data lock and I have to upgrade from Mojave to get to latest version (not happening).
• Google Todo: this is one hell of a weird product. WTF is their web strategy? Tied to Gmail? Tied to Calendar? At least there's data export.
• Things
• OmniFocus: poor Omni is in some disarray ...
• Microsoft To Do

Today I dug into Microsoft To Do. Of course it's a mess, but this is 2020 so we expect that. The mess starts with Microsoft reusing product names. To simplify a bit:

• There are classic Outlook Tasks. I'll call these TasksClassic. TasksClassic was excellent in many ways, including, once upon a time, great import/export options and lots of view flexibility (I like to sort by last modified!). Unfortunately it's dead, just barely hanging on in the current desktop app with some degree of synchronization with the new product.
• There's the new Wanderlist-based product variable called Microsoft To Do and ... Outlook Tasks (name reuse!). I'll call these TasksW for Wanderlist.

If you open the Help screen page for macOS TasksW (To Do) it takes one to a page on Outlook synchronization that's obsolete -- because the Outlook.com version of Tasks has switched from TasksClassic to TasksW. On the other hand the version of Office 365 on my Mac still has TasksClassic, and it does synchronize with TasksW as displayed on macOS and iOS Microsoft To Do.app.

Are you still with me?

This gave me a brief moment of hope that there was some data freedom here. I remember the import/export options of old Windows Outlook. Alas, the only import/export from macOS Outlook is Microsoft's PST format. There might be some way to do things with Outlook Windows or with 3rd party tools but I don't have the energy for that.

At this time I think TasksW is probably a decent enough product, but this has reminded me how screwed up Microsoft is. So I'm setting this one aside for the moment.

See also:

• There are no great task managers for the iPhone - but there's hope for 2011: My current task list started out on the Palm III and has migrated many times. I probably have uncompleted tasks from the 1990s. I think we're coming to the end of that data migration though. Note from 2010: "Google might finally provide an API for Google Tasks, allowing iOS client development."
• My ancient spreadsheet on migrating from Palm to iPhone - I think I used Outlook Tasks as part of the migration process, or maybe even Microsoft Access. Alas, too long ago. Painful though.

Apple's iCloud control panel enables iCloud Contacts within corporate Outlook

iCloud support is limited to relatively new Macs able to at least run Lion. Practically speaking, Mountain Lion.

Apple is kinder to the Windows world. The iCloud Control Panel will run on Outlook 2007 or later on any old OS.

I suppose they don't have the same sales incentives on the Windows platform. In any event, it seems to work very much like the old MobileMe Control Panel, at least when it comes to Contacts. I installed it on a Win 7 laptop running Outlook 2007 that syncs to Exchange Server and I now have full access to my iPhone/Mac Contacts.

It works by creating a new account, separate from the Exchange account. There are few install options -- you have to sync Calendar, Contacts and Reminders (but not Notes). Just like MobileMe [2] (I suspect some shared code). It also creates an IMAP account.

I had some glitches on installation and had to fiddle with restarting both the Control Panel and Outlook 2007, but now it seems stable. I didn't want the IMAP service so I canceled out of the credentials prompt and deleted the IMAP account.

There's no way to turn off Reminders, so I now sync my iPhone reminders in some puzzling ways -- basically via ActiveSync/Exchange for one set of reminders, via this method for the iCloud set. Weird.

Contacts is what I was interested in and it seems to work. Since Outlook allows only one Group per Contact, and iCloud allows many [1] there are potential problems related to Group assignment. In the case of MobileMe this didn't seem to break anything.

It's great to have all my Contacts at hand, and to able to quickly add to them. As an extra bennie, I get to use Outlook's Contact views. They are old and complex, but they are far more powerful than anything Apple gives me.

[1] Group relationships are kind of messed up between iOS and OS X, but Apple has bigger problems.
[2] At one time MobileMe Control Panel could work with Outlook/Exchange, but then it coulnd't -- which made things hard. This version can, perhaps because it creates a new local account.

Fixing Outlook's Ctrl-D usability bug - with AutoHotkey

The letter S is next to the letter D - on my keyboard anyway.

That means when my lifelong q10sec Ctrl-S twitch hits, there's a 1/200 chance I hit Ctrl-D instead.

In Outlook Ctrl-S saves an email, but Ctrl-D deletes it - without warning. In the midst of my work my email vanishes.

This is annoying, but I usually catch it. I make a trip to the Deleted Items folder and drag the email back to Drafts. The other day, however, I was multitasking and didn't notice I'd deleted my email. It wasn't in the UI, it wasn't in Drafts, I probably assumed I'd sent it. Later I emptied my Deleted Items folder (because, by default, Microsoft's slightly daft Search tool includes Outlook Deleted Items, I keep that folder empty).

The email was gone. Minor panic ensued the next day. Fortunately I realized the email was lost, so I responded with an apology rather than being obnoxious.

I resolved to fix the bug. I found very little on the web, really just this one unanswered question: Ctrl-D del adjacent to Ctrl-S save. Either this afflicts very few people, or most don't realize what's happening.

So I asked on our corporate social network (Yammer) and a colleague gave me the answer. He wrote me an AutoHotkey macro that swallows the Ctrl-D key when Outlook is running.

;-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#ifwinactive ahk_class rctrl_renwnd32
^d::
return

It works!

Since I grew up on TSRs (if you don't know what that means then you are blessed in more ways than one) so I try to avoid system hacks like this, but Outlook's Ctrl-D bug has broken me. Since I've signed up, I now need to find other ways to use this utility...

The Outlook 2007 blocked sender list import file function is flaky: how to fix it.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Tinderbox, Simplenote, MindNode and data freedom

I really think Tinderbox ($250!) should have said something about this earlier ...

Tinderbox: The Tool For Notes

.... Tinderbox shares notes with with Simplenote for Web and iPhone access...

The big (Big) problem with apps like Tinderbox, Evernote, or MindManager and its kin is data freedom. Specifically, the absence of data freedom. There's no standard for the representation of attributes and relationships in a nodes and arcs graph app -- it's a fundamental knowledge representation problem [1][2]. Years of rich data get flushed away when an app dies.

When, not if. All software dies. Ask Lotus Agenda users. Or the users of, and this is far from a complete list, Ecco Professional, InfoCentral, PackRat, Sidekick, Arrange (Common Knowledge - MacOS), InfoDepot, In Control, Cross-Ties, Palm Notes, Commence, Ascend, Arcadia (OS/2!), GrandView and MORE, Inspiration, Outlook Notes, and so many, many, many more.

Assyrian clay tablets from the library of Ashurbanipal have endured for thousands of years, my GrandView notes didn't do so well.

Data can outlive software -- but only if it's portable. Not forever of course, but maybe until the end of civilization [3]. JPEG images are in the running, video not so much. UTF-8 text files are serious contenders.

The SimpleNote ecosystem is based on UTF-8 text and RTF files with optional markdown formatting. That's why I like it - the core data store can endure. It's accessible from iOS device, OS X, XP, W7, Dropbox [4] web -- everywhere.

Still, notes alone, even with tagging and search, are not enough. I want a way to layer arcs upon the text nodes.

I could almost do it using MindNode Pro. I could attach SimpleNote notes to MindNode nodes and keep both MindNode file and SimpleNote files on Dropbox. Problem is, it's awkward to attach and create files to MN nodes. The icons are too large and the node doesn't inherit the file name -- and I need a keyboard shortcut to create an external text file on demand.

Doesn't that text icon seem a bit big to you? It can be resized, but it always defaults to enormous.

I haven't given up hope that Markus Muller will accept my suggestions, but I'm reluctantly leaving MindNode Pro on the shelf while I watch where he goes with it.

Tinderbox though -- if it could actually use SimpleNote ... and if it could become Dropbox compatible ... and if I'm careful about how I manage and distribute Tinderbox specific metadata ... That's interesting. It's a heck of a lot of money though, and I fear using its full power would put me into deep data lock.

See also:

• ATPM 10.10 - ATPO: Deep Tinderbox: 2004 view -- but gives a good sense of how it works

Update: MaysonicWrites points us to Dave Winer's World Outline project, I think as an example of a liberated data solution to managing some kinds of information.

- fn -

[1] Consider HL7 RIM 3 and the challenges of CDA/SNOMED model integration. Ok, so nobody knows what I mean by that. Trust me, it's relevant.
[2] Ok. There is a standard. It's called the hyperlink and HTML. This post is long enough, but I'm tempted to look for late 1990s book on hypertext I have somewhere, and to summon a BYTE article on a hypertext version of Gopher from the 1990s. I suppose software archeology is a hobby now. I am disappointed that we don't have wiki-like personal information tool that uses HTML/RTF/text and hyperlink as the information store, WordPress API as an authoring option, and the ability to migrate the repository from local drive to cloud.
[3] Outrageous you say! What could last that long? Well, yes.
[4] I'm a late adopter, but increasingly a fan.

Consolidating Contacts: From Outlook to Address Book via MobileMe and the 5th Circle

This option is, for now, only open to the few people who have MobileMe accounts. Maybe iCloud will add something like this. I'll pass it on for the record.

The time had come to consolidate my work and personal contacts. No, I'm not changing jobs. A change in work policy meant I could no longer sync my iPhone to Exchange. I need my work contacts on my iPhone to do my job, so I needed to consolidate.

This is what I did. I bit imperfect perhaps, but it was reasonably fast.

1. Using Outlook 2007 at work I copied all my Contacts to a PST file. That copy action makes Outlook resolve Exchange format email into standard email format. Took the PST home.
2. Use Address Book export to save an archive. Turned off MobileMe sync on all machines. Put iPhone into Airport mode.
3. Started up my VMWare Fusion XP with Outlook 2007 standalone. Using MobileMe on XP I did a sync to MobileMe.
4. In Outlook 2007 standalone I imported the PST file Contacts (1012 items) from the external PST file into a new subfolder of Contacts. I then did another sync to MobileMe.
5. Switched to OS X then turned MobileMe sync back on. It said there were 1007 (not 1012) items to install. When it was done, there 1002 "cards" in a new "Group"

Note that, at face value, I lost 10 contacts during the import process. However, Outlook still showed 1012 even after I repeated a sync there. It's mostly likely 10 contacts won't sync, but it's also possible Address Book does some kind of duplicate merging on import -- but doesn't add the correct recreate Group-Name relationship.

I then ran Contacts Cleaner from Spanning Tools (App Store, cheap). It found 635 "conflicts" (issues, really), of which a surprisingly small number were duplicates. I set to work cleaning that up (Contacts Cleaner has an annoying habit of flagging academic suffixes as "bad".

After an initial cleanup I went back and forth between OS X and XP/VM, each time repeating a sync then running Contacts Cleaner. It only took a few minutes to find problems and settle things down.

Some data is lost of course. Sync must have its price. I made liberal use of 'Categories' (now we'd call these 'tags') to slice and dice my Outlook Contacts. They are all gone now. That is sad.

On the other hand, OS X allows a Contact to be associated with more than one Group. I can make use of that. It's too bad MobileMe Sync didn't try to turn Categories/tags into Groups. (And too bad you can't edit group assignments on an iOS device!)

There was only one funny thing. I've seen this once before. I created a Smart Group for all Cards that had no Group assignment. Over 1,000 showed up unexpectedly. I quit and restarted and all was well. It's a good idea to quit and restart Address Book after a large update.

Once I had things sorted out between my XP and OS X sources I turned on my iPhone and let it reconcile to the new addresses. I found some oddities on searching while Spotlight sorted out the additions.

The iPhone sync added more duplicates! Yes, Synchronization is Hell. I'd almost be disappointed if it weren't.

Back to Contact Cleaner again and I returned to 1805 total contacts. Even so, I readily found a contact that wouldn't sync to my iPhone. I made another backup of my Address Book.

So I turned off MobileMe Contacts sync. That should have removed all Contacts from my phone, but quite a few remained. I had to remove my MobileMe accounts and add it back. Yes, even though we've yet to develop artificial sentience, we have developed artificial dementia.

All were back on my iphone, but we were back to 1043. Clearly, we had a problem. I removed more duplicates but ended up with only 1804. So I restored from backup.

I was in the 5th circle of sync hell, but I've been here before. Call me Dante. I used advanced MobileMe sync to forcibly replace everything on MobileMe with what I had on my home server. I confirmed MobileMe had 1805 contacts, then reenabled Contact sync on my iPhone. Then I forced sync from MobileMe to my other two Macs. At last all showed 1805 contacts [1].

For now. Synchronization is Hell. I don't think iCloud will be any better. In fact, I expect it to be worse.

[1] I'd written previously that Address Book for Lion didn't show a count of cards. It does; you have to scroll to the very bottom of the address (card) list to see it.

Migrating Contacts from Outlook/Exchange server to OS X Address Book via MobileMe

For the past year I've had one set of Contacts in Outlook/Exchange server and another set in OS X Address Book/MobileMe. My iPhone pulled in both sets, so they met there. (I'll omit the added complexity of how I sync to Google.)

This worked quite well, but now I need to bring all my Contacts into OS X Address Book. There are several ways to do this [1], but in the midst of some quick Google searches I remembered I'd written about this. I like my approach best, as detailed in two 2009 posts (neither of which rank highly on Google fwiw [2]):

• Gordon's Tech: Project Contacts: Now mixing Outlook/Exchange, PST file, Outlook/Home, MobileMe Sync, OS X Address Book and the iPhone (5/2009)
• Gordon's Tech: MobileMe: Integrating Work and Personal Contacts (11/2009)

The value of this approach is it uses Apple's own software to manage the Outlook to Address Book translation. The problem is that it requires MobileMe, which is no longer publicly available. I'm hoping Apple will do something similar with iCloud -- assuming they don't shut Windows out entirely.

The software I use is the Contact Sync tool built into MobileMe for Windows. These are the components:

1. MobileMe (alas, closed to new users ... maybe iCloud will work one day?)
2. Outlook 2007 running on XP (in my case, in a VM)
3. MobileMe Control Panel for Windows (no support for Outlook/Exchange, only Outlook standalone)
4. OS Address Book.

The first step is to get a copy of my Contacts into Outlook 2007 at home.

1. Clean out all Contacts from Outlook 2007.
2. Using MobileMe control panel and "sync reset" I sync everything from MobileMe into Outlook 2007.

Second step is to copy my Contacts from Exchange Server to a PST file. This has the added benefit of transforming X400 style email addresses to standard format.

Third step is ...

1. Back up OS X Address Book contacts.
2. Add the PST file as a data file and drag and drop Contacts into a subfolder of Contacts (see above articles for details, this is how Apple's sync software treats OS X Address Book Groups -- as Contacts subfolders).
3. Sync again to get them all to MobileMe and inspect MobileMe.
4. In OS X sync to get them all to Address Book.

I'm reminded of something I'd forgotten -- how vastly better Outlook is for managing contacts than OS X Address Book -- especially since Microsoft Access can manipulate Outlook contacts. It's reason alone to have my VM keep synchronizing with MobileMe.

[1] CSV export doesn't work very well. There are some utilities that probably work; one reader of mine had success using Plaxo.
[2] A splog that had stolen a post of mine ranked higher than my stuff. Maybe I should start taking Google's ads?

Strangest sync error ever - Google Calendar

This is very strange.

I use Google Calendar Sync to sync an Outlook/Exchange calendar to Google Calendar.

On that machine I authenticate with two Google accounts, one has two factor authentication.

It looks like Google Calendar Sync is posting transactions to both accounts even though it has only one account's password.

At least, that's the best explanation I have so far.

Again - one of the weirdest things I've seen in a while, even allowing that sync is fraught with weird errors.

iOS 3 bug with recurring Exchange meetings changed in iOS 4.

Apple just can't manage to get this one right. I tested an old iOS Exchange Server calendaring bug with Outlook 2007 and Exchange 2007.

In iOS 3 if you declined an instance of a recurring meeting you removed all the meetings from your calendar.

In iOS 4 if you decline an instance of a recurring meeting you remove it from your iPhone calendar (good) but not from your Outlook calendar (very bad).

Fail.

Deep sigh. Apple does not deserve its reputation for "quality". Design yes, quality no.

I'll retest with iOS 4.1 when it's out.

Migrating Notes from ToodleDo to ResophNotes and the Simplenote ecosystem

[Shortly after I first wrote this, C.Y. released ResophNotes 1.0.5. Among other things, such as the ability to store notes as indexable .txt files, it has direct support for importing ToodleDo’s CSV file. He’d told me the release was coming soon, I did it my way just for geek fun. I’ve therefore moved the details of what I did to a footnote. BTW, turns out C.Y., like me, migrated to Simplenote from Toodledo/Appigo!]

Once I'd rescued my memory fragments from Outlook 2007 my next goal was to unify them from the former Palm Memos I'd (painfully) migrated to ToodleDo and thus Appigo's Notebook.app.

I've been reasonably happy with the combination of ToodleDo and Appigo, but notes are very much a 2nd class citizen on ToodleDo (they're all about tasks) and their search tools are pretty weak. I also wanted to be able to access and work with my notes from my desktop on Windows and the Mac, to be able to back them up, to have them be exposed to Spotlight search on OS X, to integrate my old corporate Outlook Notes with my old personal former Palm Memos and to have at least one open source repository in the mix. I needed the notes to live in a standard file format (UTF-8 text or RTF) free of all data lock.

Sounds like a lot, but the combination of ResophNotes (XP and higher - free but do donate), Simplenote (Cloud, ad-supported or $9/year - I paid - see documentation), Simplenote.app (iPhone and iPad app, free) and Notational Velocity (open source, OS X - documentation) gave me everything I wanted -- plus Chrome extensions for editing.

There was only one thing standing in my way. How could I get my ToodleDo notes into Simplenote?

I knew that ResophNotes (Win) would import Outlook's peculiar CSV files (embedded paragraphs!), but the developer, C.Y. I still days away from releasing a more general CSV import feature. I was impatient, so this is what I did. (see footnote [1])

During my early import experiments, because I used a Mac for part of the process, I ran into character encoding problems. Since ResophNotes doesn't yet have note multiselect and delete [2] I had to find its database and delete it.

ResophNotes exports and imports .RSN files (yay! backup!), but that's not how it works with notes. I found them in "C:\Documents and Settings\jfaughnan" in a .ResophNotes folder (hidden). To delete them and start over you have to quit ResophNotes, then find the instance in Task Manager Processes and kill it, then you can delete the files.

That let me start over again.

BTW, here's how the notes look in Notational Velocity's "Notational Notes" store:

Yes, each note a separate Rich Text file (I may convert to safer plain text) -- all Spotlight indexed.

Just in time for my birthday.

Nerdvana.

[1] Now that ResophNotes has direct ToodleDo import, I’ll include this as a reference for how one might support CSV variants other than ToodleDo or Outlook. My procedure was especially weird because I happened to have a Mac at hand…

1. Use ToodleDo's Notes CSV export to my Mac.
2. Import into FileMaker and use Calculation field to merge the ToodleDo Title and Notes into an Outlook style "Note Body". I next renamed the ToodleDo "Folder" column to Category.
3. Created FileMaker columns to match Outlook's names, and exported as CSV. I had to paste this string in as the first row: "Note Body","Categories","Note Color","Priority","Sensitivity". I left all values except Note Body and Category null. In retrospect I should have appended "Categories" as a string to the end of "Note Body" to facilitate search.
4. I used TextWrangler to clean up some character encoding CR/LF issues. This was only necessary because I got a Mac in the mix. Curse that ancient CR/LF screwup. It seems to have survived into the world of UTF-8 encoding.
5. I fired up my Fusion VM (way better than it first was on 10.6) and my old XP image and moved the file over. I opened it in Word and saved as UTF-8 to remove any residual character encoding issues.
6. I imported into ResophNotes. When I was sure all was well, I synchronized ResophNotes with Simplenotes and all my notes merged into one lovely repository. I fired up Notational Velocity in another window and confirmed all was fine there as well.

[2] Since the latest version can store as .txt files, I assume one could just delete all the .txt files! I haven’t tried this tough.

Escape from Outlook Notes - ResophNotes, SimpleNote for iPhone and Notational Velocity

I had despaired of rescuing my notes from Outlook 2007.

I'd written hundreds over time. In the old days I used Palm products that would sync with Outlook, so I could carry them with me. Now my iPhone, after years of struggle, gives me good Outlook sync with Contacts and Calendars. Notes and Tasks, however, have been orphaned. There's no real hope of an Outlook Notes to iPhone sync solution; although a few people use Outlook Tasks almost nobody uses Outlook Notes.

I've learned to live without corporate Outlook Tasks (I schedule my time on a 3 week plan basis), but I wanted those notes. I decided they needed to live within either ToodleDo Notes/Appigo Notebook, iPhone Notes (unlikely), or the Simplenote / NotationalVelocity universe (for various reasons I've given up on Evernote).

Today I discovered ResophNotes, a Windows app that syncs with the Simplenote cloud data store. The Simplenote cloud data store, of course, also syncs with Notational velocity (open source, OS X Spotlight indexed), OS X Tinderbox, OS X Yojimbe (3rd party sync), and there's a Chrome extension for editing notes.

I exported my Outlook 2007 notes to Outlook's odd CSV format (includes line feeds!), then I imported into ResophNotes and synchronized with Simplenote's cloud store. Then on my iPhone I viewed them in the Simplenote iPhone client.

It worked better than I'd expected.

Now I can move my old (originally Palm III Notes, now ToodleDo/Appigo Notebook) personal notes to the same cloud store. I'll sign up for the $10/year premium Simplenote service. (Currently I have free version.) If Simplenote belly up the rich ecosystem and open source Notational Velocity desktop solution provides the insurance I need.

A good day.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: The rise of software rental (aka software as service)
• Moving Palm notes to Toodledo via CSV file - what worked. (Hard!)
• Appigo Notebook is coming to the iPhone
• Kiss your Google Notebook good-bye
• Palm to iPhone migration - address book and notes (Aug 2008 - dated)
• Toodledo gets it
• Appigo and Toodledo – nasty emergent design flaw makes a mess of my iPhone Notes and Tasks
• Evernote's import/export test (updated)

Update 7/31/10: The author of ResophNotes tells me he's preparing a new version that will import CSV files -- like the ones ToodleDo Notes export creates. Incidentally, I discovered that FileMaker Pro 8 does a great job opening Outlook's CSV files with embedded line feeds. I never imagined ...

Best new Outlook 2007 feature: Do Not Save sent message

I don’t have a lot of warm feelings about the Office 2007 “Quick Access Toolbar” or most any new Outlook 2007 feature, but there is one killer feature that the two of ‘em together give you.

You can configure the Quick Access Toolbar so that you click a simple checkbox and any message you send is not saved!

Okay, so why should you care?

Well, for those of us who live by full text search Outlook “Sent Items” are a goldmine. I don’t bother sorting mine – every few months I dump a few thousand into my PST “Save” folder and make space on Exchange. I routinely use Windows Search 4 to find answers to important questions in seconds. It’s been my biggest cognitive computing boost since Google replaced Alta Vista.

Problem is, the Sent Messages also contain thank you notes, social messages, acknowledgements, and other noise. It’s tedious to delete those, so I typically leave them alone and only delete them when they show up in searches.

How much better then, never to save them at all. If only there were a one click method to not save those “thank you” notes…

Now there is …

 

Now when I send a simple email that I don’t want to clutter future search results, I just click ‘Do Not Save’. No more junk in my Sent Items list! (I don’t use email for anything very sensitive, so that use case doesn’t apply.)

In order to set this up you need to:

1. Start a new email message. This is the only way to see the email-specific “quick access toolbar”. (In Outlook 2007 the ribbon bars and quick access toolbars are distributed throughout the various Outlook data types such as Appointment, Tasks and so on. Yes, Outlook 2007 really is a train wreck.)
2. Click the Quick Access Toolbar customization drop down to the right of the toolbar and select “More Commands”
3. Customize as you wish (There are lots of interesting options, but many do not have distinctive icons. See “train wreck”, above.) Here’s where to find the “Do Not Save” control:
   

Update: Note that the Quick Access Toolbar you see when viewing a message is different from the Quick Access Toolbar you get when editing a message. Remember – Outlook = “train wreck”.

Big switch on my iPhone sync: CalDAV and Exchange server

In the last episode of ‘As the iPhone Turns’ our hero was getting business contacts to the iPhone via PST export to Outlook on home XP to MobileMe to the iPhone. Office calendar data traveled one way via Google Calendar Sync to Google Calendar. Google Calendar and Contacts went to the iPhone via Google’s Active Sync (Exchange Server) clone. Address Book on OS X synced to MobileMe on several machines. iCal was out of the picture.

Today it’s all shook up. I can now use Exchange server to bring office contacts, calendar and email to my iPhone. Since the iPhone can support only one Exchange Active Sync connection I switched my Google Calendar sync to CalDAV; for now office appts still go there via one way Google Calendar Sync. I still don’t use iCal.

Personal Contacts now go via MobileMe to the iPhone. Google Contacts don’t go anywhere (for now).

The downside is that my office contacts no longer appear in OS X Address Book, but the ease of updating and ability to edit on my iPhone makes up for that. My first impression is that CalDAV is a better fit for Google Calendar than Active Sync, and that Exchange sync works better with a true Exchange server than with Google Calendar.

Hope you followed all that, I’m not sure I did.

Update 12/3/09: I've seen one odd behavior that might be a bug. I can see and edit Emily's calendar. So when Emily invited me to an event I at first accepted, then realized I didn't need to see her event and mine. So I deleted the invited even, so only hers remained. Problem is, her appointment then vanished on my iPhone! but it was viewable on her iPhone and on the web.

So it was still around, I just couldn't see it. I removed the "invited, not coming" data from the event and changed it enough to force a refresh, it then reappeared.

I wonder if there's a problem with deleting an invited appointment while viewing the original appointment on another person's calendar.

MobileMe: Integrating Work and Personal Contacts

It can be exceedingly difficult to get corporate Exchange Server contacts to an iPhone if you don’t have ActiveSync access to the Exchange Server.

In this setting you can’t sync work Contacts with MobileMe (you used to be able to, but no longer. I’ve never heard an explanation of why Apple pulled this capability). I don’t think you can use iTunes sync either, though I don’t want to sync my iPhone at work anyway.

There are several software solutions that claim to be able to extract these Contacts. I’ve tried most of them – they were either buggy or they couldn’t resolve EX style corporate email references. In Outlook 2003 you could fairly readily export Contacts as vCards, but when I do that with Outlook 2007 I get weird formatting problems. (Of course this is export, not sync, but we can’t be picky here).

The only solution I’ve gotten to work thus far is to put my corporate contacts into a PST file, take them home, put them in non-Exchange Outlook at home, and sync to MobileMe. [1]

I sync my OS X Address Book to MobileMe as well, then sync my iPhone to OS X Address Book. That gives me work and home addresses both on my iPhone, on my desktop machines, and on my laptop. [2]

Here are the details of the initial setup. Once you’re done with that maintenance isn’t too bad.

Notes

• The “source of truth” for the work contacts is corporate Outlook, the “source of truth” for my home contacts is OS X Address Book.
• This is not synchronization. It is publishing one way. Updates after initial sync are discussed below.

There are two sources of data that will sync to MobileMe.

1. Outlook 2003 home: Starts with an empty Contacts Folder. An external data folder (PST) holds material copied from work including all Contacts.
2. OS X 10.5 Address Book: Has several Groups, but one Group has no members. It is is called Contacts_Work. (Warning: If you’re cleaning out a Group in Address Book it’s easy to “remove from group” when you want to delete.)

Step one: Sync OS X Address Book to MobileMe

1. Sync OS X Address Book to MobileMe.
2. Sync iPhone to OS X Address Book through iTunes.

Step Two: Sync Outlook to MobileMe

1. Open MobileMe Control Panel.
2. Set to Sync with Outlook.
3. Click Sync now. On a first sync you will be asked if you want to overwrite the computer or MobileMe. Choose to overwrite the computer.
4. When you are done you will see an Outlook “folder” for each "OS X Group” beneath the original (empty) Outlook Contacts folder. [3] The one called Contacts_Work will be empty.

Step Three: Copy work Contacts into empty Contacts_work

1. Move (or copy) Contacts from the work PST file to Contacts_Work. I select all, then right click and drag.
2. Clean up the Contacts_Work folder. Remove lists, etc.
3. Sync to MobileMe. Now Outlook and MobileMe are done.

Step Four: Finish Syncs

1. Sync OS X Address Book to MobileMe
2. Sync iPhone to OS X Address Book [4] via iTunes.
3. Sync to additional OS X machines as desired.

Addendum - Updates

This is all 1 way, so there’s no sync back to the office. This works fairly well for me however. My corporate contacts don’t change that much, but each time I do an update like this I record the date. Then contacts added or modified after that date are periodically carried home, used to update Outlook, and then I sync as above.

Problems to expect

Synchronization is Hell, but even messaging across databases is Heck. There are attributes and properties in Outlook that Address Book can’t support. There’s location information in Address Book Outlook can’t support. An Address Book contact can belong to many groups, an Outlook contact can belong to only one folder. I try to edit the Work Contacts only in Outlook, everything else only in Address Book.

See also

• The MobileMe Massacre begins
• Work home contact integration- Outlook to Google to OS X Address Book (EX problem)
• Project Contacts- Now mixing Outlook-Exchange, PST file, Outlook-Home, MobileMe Sync … – an earlier version of this post.
• Project Contacts: Integration across iPhone, Google and whatever
• Google saves my iPhone
• gSyncit for Outlook 2007 to Google Calendar and Contacts Sync
• MobileMe, Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, iTunes and yes, sync Hell
• MobileMe syncs with Outlook (yes, once it did. Apple disabled this Exchange sync.)

-- Footnotes --

[1] I’ve not tried synching my iPhone via iTunes to two machines at home – XP/Outlook and OS X/Address Book. I just didn’t think of that one until I wrote this post! I know there’s some multi-machine sync capability with the iPhone.

[2] I also sync my iPhone to Google by ActiveSync (Exchange server) protocol. So I have my Google contacts on the iPhone too. There’s a ton of duplication on the phone between the OS X source and the Google source. Resolving that is a future task.

[3] The symmetry is misleading. A single Address Book entry can belong to multiple Address Book groups, but an Outlook Contact can only belong to one folder. (Acyclic Graph vs. Tree)

[4] This is what I currently do. I may try just synching wirelessly to MobileMe.

[5] I assume Contacts that belong to several OS X Groups are duplicated when they go to Outlook. I wonder why they don’t proliferate, breeding with each sync.

SyncWiz for Outlook Review - how not to do trial software

When I was using Outlook 2003, I had a kludgy but reasonable way to get my corporate Outlook contacts to a primarily personal iPhone.

I started out using MobileMe to get PST transported contacts to OS X Address Book.

Once I'd done the bulk of the work I found my workplace Outlook 2003 could export .VCF (vCard) files that OS X address book could import. Contacts don't change too often, so I just sorted by Contacts by date revised and emailed the new ones.

Then I went to Outlook 2007, the poor, broken, abused step-child of the Office 2007 suite. Outlook was ugly but serviceable in 2003, but Microsoft butchered it for the 2007 transition. One of the many broken bits was the semi-documented vCard export. In 2007, the only vCard export option is tied to sending them as email attachments.

I could live with that, but in OS X Address Book these Outlook 2007 vCards have notes full of unreadable XML.

So, in desperation, I closed my eyes, tried to ignore my past experiences with Outlook Add-Ins, and tried this product in trial mode ...

SyncWiz

... With SyncWiz convert selected or all of your items to vCard, iCard, iCalendar (iCal), or vCalendar file format. This file is so portable and compressible, that you can easily send the whole folder to anyone (4000 contacts in a zipped Vcard file is less than 100Kb)...

After installation I tried the VCF export. SyncWiz told me I had more than 5 contacts, so it quit. It didn't export five then stop, it just quit.

I decided that was a strong sign this wasn't a serious product, so I uninstalled it.

I then restarted Outlook 2007 -- and found the Add-In had not been removed and Outlook was revolted by it.

So now Outlook showed the SyncWiz add-in as disabled. Fine, but I'd just as soon delete it forever.

Except, you can't delete an Outlook Plug-In from Outlook 2007. You can only inactivate it, and admire the festering corpse.

I hate Outlook Add-Ins. I ain't well disposed to either Microsoft or Outlook 2007 either ...

Looking for your Google Calendar Sync Log files?

This morning I discovered all information about the log files for Google Calendar Sync had been deleted from the net.

No, seriously. It’s all gone.

Weird.

But, if you’re reading this, you know that. You’ll only have gotten to this post if all your other searches have failed.

Anyway, if you’re having problems with Google Calendar Sync you’ll usually need to check the logs. They’re here on XP:

C:\Documents and Settings\[your account name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Calendar Sync\logs

In my case GCS has actually been behaving fairly well lately. The current bug is only a nuisance; if Outlook isn’t running GCS throws up an error message "could not obtain microsoft outlook version". It’s annoying, but harmless.

Note I only do one way sync – from Outlook/Exchange to Google Calendar. I consider two way sync to be an unreachable dream; Microsoft and Google calendaring are much too different. I sync from Outlook to gCal, and from gCal to my iPhone using Google’s exchange calendar services.

Project Contacts: iPhone 3.0 means I hack away at Google Contacts, and discover another rough spot

In my last installment of Project Contacts (Launched 2/14/09) I discovered that copying my Corporate (Exchange server/Outlook) contacts to a PST file converted email addresses from EX (x.500) to standard SMTP. I brought the PST to my home Outlook (on XP box) and then used MobileMe Sync to get the work contacts nicely integrated with my iPhone and my iMac.

That took me 70% of the way to getting my Contacts mega-mess sorted out. The cost was a subscription to MobileMe (later canceled within 30 day limit) and some modest manual updating [1].

I figured I’d wait a bit before tackling the last bit of the Contacts mess – my Gmail Contacts. I need to merge them in to my OS X Address Book repository [2]. Google is supposed to migrate to a more sync friendly format (structured names), but it’s going slowly. I figured I’d wait.

Then I got iPhone OS 3. The one good feature so far is that I can sync my Google Contacts to my iPhone via Google’s exchange server support while ALSO synching my OS X Address Book (with work and home) to my iPhone.

I did that and ended up with thousands of duplicates, but this isn’t as bad as it sounds. They were segregated by account. Still, it made phone searching pretty slow.

So I spent an hour slogging away at Gmail cleanup. I removed a large redundant group of about 800 contacts, then hand deleted another 200 or so. The 30-40 minute process reminded me that I’ve lived a fairly long time already; some of those names had pretty old memories with them (they still exist in my main contacts – I was just deleting unwanted redundancies).

The good news is that Google’s Contact Merge feature works quite nicely. The bad news is that every time you delete a contact, the screen redraws and you start over again at the top of the Contacts List. Sigh. More evidence nobody at Google uses the Gmail we use.

So now I’d say I’m 77% of the way to completing Project Contacts. I’m waiting now for Google to compete their structured name transition and for Spanning Sync to be suitably updated. Then I’ll start working on the last step. On my iPhone, at least, I do have every Contact at hand at all times. That’s progress.

[1] Turns out my work Contacts don’t change all that quickly, so for various reasons I won’t go into I don’t actually need MobileMe to manually copy changed Outlook Contacts to my iMac. I am probably going to get MobileMe for other reasons however.

[2] Address Book is the least weak of Apple’s astoundingly unimpressive desktop PIM suite, but it’s still not an ideal repository.

Update: I was so pleased with Google's Contact Merge feature I decided to try the same feature in OS X Address Book. Oops! Address Book's Merge is completely automatic. In Gmail Contacts you can review the merged record and revise it or reject it. In almost every merge I did make some corrections. OS X Address Book just executes the merge, it doesn't even identify the merged records. Damn, but Apple sucks so abysmally at everything Palm was good at.

Update 12/23/10: I've been using Spanning Sync, MobileMe, Address Book OS X, iPhone Contacts and Google Contacts all more or less in sync for about a year.

Windows Search 4: Cannot select drive or folders (grayed out)

I recently reinstalled Windows Search on a freshly imaged corporate XP laptop.

I was dismayed to discover that the only thing showing in my “Indexing Options” / “Included Locations” list was an unused Outlook Express account. When I clicked ‘Modify’ to get to “indexed Locations” and “Change selected locations” (notice some labeling inconsistencies here?) Outlook didn’t show at all and all but one uninteresting folder on my C drive were mysteriously grayed (greyed) out.

The Outlook problem went away with a restart and a review with Outlook running. I’m having complex and intractable issues with Outlook/Exchange authentication, so I can’t make too much of this one.

The mysteriously unselectable grayed out C drive folders persisted however, and the Windows Search 4.0 Troubleshooting Guide was of no use. My clue came when I clicked down into the tree display. Turns out the UI is misleading; even when a folder is gray it may contain searchable subfolders.

Once I saw that, luck played a role. By chance my mouse rested on folder, and a yellow contextual popup appeared. The message told me the folder was not marked for indexing.

Aha! The original disk image was flawed. Somehow the default “allow indexing service to index this disk” had been altered. I opened the context menu for the C drive and checked the appropriate box.

Windows Search 4 now worked.

Update: Incidentally, the machine transition revealed that I'm utterly dependent on Windows Search. I can no longer work without robust full text search and a powerful collection of search operators. A new dependency ....

Cannot remove (delete) a SharePoint List reference from Outlook 2007 - a fix

One of the less wise things I’ve done in the past year was to migrate to Office 2007, and, in particular, to try using any of the new features of Outlook 2007.

I’ve seen some awful software in my day, but Outlook 2007 is in a class of of its own.

For example, I once tried subscribing to a SharePoint list from Outlook, so Outlook would, in theory, give me a synchronized offline view of the list.

I no longer recall the immediate problems it caused me, but I do remember I couldn’t remove it. At best I could partly disable the synchronization. The list reference lived on in my Account Settings.

I left it there, hoping the long promised SP2 would help. I thought I could live with it.

Then my sojourn into the 9th circle of IT Hell began. After week 3 of network lockouts I began methodically removing anything that could trigger an Active Directory authentication process, including any reference to anything hosted on Sharepoint. That included any referenced calendars, feeds, etc. Including my old Sharepoint List reference that could be seen in File:Data File Management:Account Settings:SharePoint Lists.

After some searching I found a good TechNet posting that referenced another relevant article.

There were two different fixes for this problem, but one was to remove a dangling reference in the send/receive settings. I remembered trying this last year, but since I’d just applied Office SP 2 I gave it a go and unchecked these items:

This time removing Sharepoint from the send/receive group worked. I was able to go to the Data File account settings and remove the Sharepoint Lists item and the corresponding Data File – and they didn’t return!

Naturally it wasn’t totally smooth. After I submitted my changes to the send/receive group an old friend returned … the IPM.Note.Microsoft.Conversation.Region set of dialogs ...

I think these are back because, as a part of my attempt to reduce Active Directory authentication, I’d recently removed Office Communicator 2007. When you do that you find the uninstall leaves some registry keys behind, and you get these error messages until you reinstall Communicator or manually remove the registry keys ...