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How do I keep Gmail from creating a contact for everyone I email?

kokotele

Lurker
Apr 7, 2010
7
1
Hi, everyone. I received my Droid last week, and this is my first post here. I've been looking all over and can't find the answer.

It seems that Gmail is creating a contact for every email I've ever sent. I use Outlook mostly and never synced my contacts before, so I never noticed. Now I've got hundreds of contacts that are just email addresses... every craigslist ad I ever responded to, every ebay question I ever received... everything.

Does anyone know a way to make this stop? I spent an hour yesterday cleaning up my contacts, and after a few more emails, have a few more contacts I don't need.

Thanks in advance for your help!
 
I don't use Outlook, so obviously I don't sync my phone or gmail contacts with it, but this might shed a little light on your problem, and hopefully someone else will come in and give you a better answer...

Gmail has a funny way of breaking down your contacts. There's "All contacts", "My contacts", and other groups you can create. Whenever you send an email, a contact is created in "all contacts" but not in "my contacts". Further, "all contacts" is not what is synced to your phone; "my contacts" is.

Yes, the question you're asking is much simpler than needing to know all of this but knowing stuff is always a good thing... However, I don't know how to tell gmail to simply stop creating a contact in "all contacts" for every email you ever send.

I hope that helps you understand a little bit about what's going on, but it's very confusing and inconsistent - I've had my Droid for 2 months and I still can't wrap my head around this contacts nonsense, but I've gotten to a place where I can function within it.

Good luck!
 
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Here's what you do on the phone:

While in the Contact app, press the Menu key and select "Display Options" and then select the Gmail account you wish to manage. You'll then see a list of all the groups you have in your Gmail account. What you want is to have only "My Contacts" checked and make sure that "All Other Contacts" is left unchecked.

Your phone will now only display those entries in your Gmail account's "My Contacts" group.

You can then go into the Gmail web interface and enter the Contacts manager and clean up your "My Contacts" group. For example, I have 128 contacts in the "All Contacts" group and have 45 in the "My Contacts" group. Only those in "My Contacts" show up on my phone via the Contacts app.
 
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Here's what you do on the phone:

While in the Contact app, press the Menu key and select "Display Options" and then select the Gmail account you wish to manage. You'll then see a list of all the groups you have in your Gmail account. What you want is to have only "My Contacts" checked and make sure that "All Other Contacts" is left unchecked.

Your phone will now only display those entries in your Gmail account's "My Contacts" group.

You can then go into the Gmail web interface and enter the Contacts manager and clean up your "My Contacts" group. For example, I have 128 contacts in the "All Contacts" group and have 45 in the "My Contacts" group. Only those in "My Contacts" show up on my phone via the Contacts app.

good info...
 
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Someday, if not already, you will be glad that gmail saves every person you ever emailed as a contact. It has saved me several times when I needed to track someone down many months after I never thought I would need to contact them again. I wish it could do the same for phone numbers. There are plenty of people I have deleted from my phones over the years that I thought I would never need to talk to again that I now have to try to track down.
 
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