WP7 Contact sync with live does not work without "touching" the contact

Question

I connected my WP7 with my Live account, in order to Sync the contacts. By the way these contacts comes from a GMail account, but I don't think it is strictly a problem. Apparently none of the imported contact are visible, the only way to have these sync properly is to "touch" by modifyng/adding something in the contact. Is there some way to solve this issue ?

Answer 1

I found a workaround, maybe not the best one,but worked for me: I exported the contacts from GMail to CSV in outlook format, then I imported that file in Live. After that all works like a charm.

Answer 2

So my Nokia Lumia 710 windows 7.8 phone ’s Windows live account was not syncing with my online live account. More precisely my calendar would sync but the Hotmail email on my phone and the contacts on my phone associated with my windows live account would not sync. I got the error- Windows Live Attention Required Next screen - We are having trouble syncing with m.hotmail.com Various error codes would follow – 86000108, 86000206

I tried various remedies prescribed on various forums- 1. Changing the server to some other server like debug-m.hotmail.com and then changing it back to m.hotmail.com 2. Changing the server to bay-m.hotmail.com (bay123.hotmail.live.com being the url I get to on a PC when I access my live.com account) 3. Unchecking the sync email checkbox in my phone settings for the windows live account. 4. Setting it to download content from the last 7 days 5. Finding the problem mail in your live.com account. I deleted all my mail (since I don’t use that account for e-mail anyway)

My problem was that I needed my contacts backed up because I have over 3000 contacts and there is no way I was going to re-enter that many contacts. Plus the backup that zune does can only be restored to the same phone. So there was no way for me backup my contacts in a way that I could transfer them to another phone when I changed my phone. All the backup softwares available on the marketplace didn’t work – contacts backup by John Li Qontact by Christian Mini ContactsBackUp by Blazedream Backup Contacts by Zooma Apps

I used the xda Developers WP7EasyBackup (which by the way is a fantastic piece of coding) to backup my entire phone excluding pictures, videos, music and whatever Zune backs up. Then I reset my phone and re-entered my windows live account. It synced. But the problem is that my phone now had no contacts to backup since I had reset it. So I restored the backup from WP7EasyBackup which brought my phone back to its pre-reset state with the non-syncing Windows live account. Same thing happened on using the Zune backup (Zune only backs up when you are updating the phone software on Zune or when you use the WPsupportToolsv2 to fake the update process). Now here’s how I solved it- I had read on one of the forums that the problem might be caused a problematic contact or calendar entry. But with no indication of how to identify such an entry. So basically the same problem as a faulty mail but with contacts. Weirdly there was just this one post in one forum talking about this, which is why I decided to write this. One of the contact backup apps I had used had lined up all the contact names in a list on the screen. Although it did not do what it was supposed to, it helped me unwittingly. I had been arbitrarily scrolling down the list of names and I noticed on entry with a box next to it. You know like a symbol that is not rendered because of a missing language or something. So I remembered that and I deleted that contact and the Windows live account began to sync. It was a miracle. So to summarize – it is possible that you have a incorrectly formatted contact. My contacts had traveled through some four past phones. Mostly nokia.