Google has finally realized that
it's a bad idea to automatically add to the list of Gmail contacts all the people you've sent an email. An updated version of Gmail's contact manager has a separate section for the people you've emailed: "suggested contacts".
"My Contacts is a place to import, store and view all of the contact information that's important to you. You can also create your own groups of contacts to easily email many people at once. We add people you've emailed to Suggested Contacts. You can move contacts from Suggested Contacts into My Contacts at any time."
There's an option to automatically move suggested contacts into My Contacts if you frequently email them, but the previous behavior doesn't seem to be an option.
I don't have this new version of the
contact manager, so if you notice other changes, post them in the comments.
Update (July 16):
Gmail's blog announces the new feature, explaining that all of the addresses show up in auto-complete. The contacts are now separated in two sections: My Contacts (the addresses explicitly added to Gmail) and Suggested Contacts (addresses automatically added by Gmail). "By default, Suggested Contacts you email frequently are automatically added to My Contacts, but for those of you who prefer tighter control of your address books, you can choose to disable usage-based addition of contacts to My Contacts."
{ Thanks, Brian G. }
Labels: Gmail
Faizal said on July 12, 2008 4:07 PM PDT:
good to hear this, i have more than 1000 contact and most of them is spammer, no-reply mail, autoresponder, alert, message that need to be approve, notification and etc.
I have always been one of the few exceptions it seems for who the old behavior was actually quite ok... just hope they will add some kind of star thingie to every user name which with a single click can add or remove somebody from ones contacts...
said on July 12, 2008 5:55 PM PDT:
Sounds like a reasonable change. I like having all those addresses handy so I don't have to hunt thru emails to find them, but at the same time I don't like them lumped in with the contacts I've explicitly saved detailed info to (phone numbers, etc).
Great! Now we need is the ability to filter email by contact group :)
Justin said on July 12, 2008 9:08 PM PDT:
This is very much longed for. Good that they finally did it. But, I don't see it yet though.
Majento said on July 12, 2008 11:20 PM PDT:
About time :-) important tweak, thnx for the update
I wonder if this will retroactively work. In other words all the ones that were added in the past because I replied to an email - will they be auto moved into this new group? Or will I have to spend a couple of hours plowing through the couple thousand emails I have in there now and do it manually?
I so wish they added two fields for First Name, Last Name, substituting the single one they have now. No syncing is useful until this is updated...
Benjamin said on July 12, 2008 11:52 PM PDT:
Thank god.
said on July 13, 2008 12:15 AM PDT:
What about a contacts bookmarklet, connection to Grandcentral, and form fields connected with Google docs?
Franck said on July 13, 2008 12:43 AM PDT:
Now they need to allow us to merge contacts with multiple google talk accounts(and still be able to use those accounts), write a tool that allows for duplicate removal and finally provide a mechanism to synchronize with outlook (like plaxo).
Well, for people using google contacts with phone numbers, the system has labels and despites their limits you can work quite well with them, if you just set up a structured approach to your mailing.
So far for me, I find this feature to be more useful than not. As long as it is reduced to "people I fwd / reply to" I am fine.
The old method, if you sent someone an email, they ended up on your contact list which is the only form of whitelisting available.
I agree that whitelisting shouldn't be a "contact" function, and that contacts should be reserved for people you want to have listed for quick reference, but to change this, but not add in specific whitelist functionality will only result in poorer email delivery.
ender said on July 13, 2008 4:54 AM PDT:
@ joe siegler: I wonder if this will retroactively work--
I just looked into my contacts,and yes, it works retroactively!!!
Zaigham said on July 13, 2008 6:09 AM PDT:
Thats great. Thanks GOOGLE! lol
said on July 13, 2008 8:47 AM PDT:
your title is misleading. gmail still auto add contacts, just to a different list.
I don't think it's misleading. Gmail will auto add mail addresses to a list of "suggested contacts", which is separate from the list of contacts. Most likely, the "suggested contacts" won't be included when you export or sync contacts.
Techack said on July 13, 2008 9:18 AM PDT:
This is quite good to hear about it. This feature should have been encorporated much before (in BETA stages)
Fredelig said on July 13, 2008 10:35 AM PDT:
Techack: It's still BETA... :)
This is long overdue. If Google is serious about getting social then it needs to focus on capturing my social graph. A list of everyone I've ever emailed isn't really very useful.
said on July 13, 2008 6:38 PM PDT:
Anyone know how long or when this shows up per account? I figure it will just appear one day in my account....this is just in time as I use my gmail contacts to sync to my iphone and the latest version allows direct sync to gmail.
Quakeboy said on July 14, 2008 1:24 AM PDT:
This is soo cool
Windy said on July 14, 2008 5:20 AM PDT:
At last! To make it now a suitable base for synchronisation we need separation of First Name and Last Name and also ablity to sort by Last / First
It's a bit worrying. We know Google has acres of graduates, most with higher degrees - but this suggests they have actually appointed someone with common sense!
Aubrey said on July 14, 2008 9:13 AM PDT:
Is there an option to easily "clean out" your google contacts book now? How about even just the ability to sort contacts by the number of times you emailed them? That and drag and drop could go a long way.
It's very nice and a major improvement. Just went through my "suggested" contacts the other day. You just click "Add to My Contacts" to move them to your regular contacts if you want.
Only minor annoyance is, as before, if you add someone who's already there (but with a different email address), you'll get two entries for the same person. So, if you just cut and paste the email address from the "suggested" entry to your existing entry (by adding a second or third alternate email - which helps greatly when later looking for emails from one person), you'll get that nasty warning about having someone already with that entry, even though it's just in the suggested contacts.
So, as before, you'll need to copy the email address, then delete the suggested contact, go to your regular contact for that person, and add the email to it then. And hope that you don't have a computer crash or power failure, else you'll have lost that email forever.
One really nice feature I do like is that a lot of the suggested contacts are (usually) just going to be emails only (no name). But Google still has the "See recent conversations from" link right there in the suggested contacts box. So, you click on that, and you'll see the email(s) which caused that entry to be in your suggested contact list. Usually you can grab the name there (if you want to keep it) or realize that you have no interest in keeping it and you can delete it.
Dave said on July 14, 2008 10:59 AM PDT:
Has anyone here used the new itunes to sync with their contacts?
I have both my Gmail and iPhone contacts organized quite well, and I am afraid a sync will screw one or both up.
I kinda want to wait til I get this new feature (suggested contacts) in my Gmail before I do it, but if someone says it syncs ok without that, I will certainly give it a try.
Also does anyone know if it syncs both ways?
Tim said on July 14, 2008 1:27 PM PDT:
I like that it automatically captures the contacts in a dedicated quarantine area for processing. It allows me to correct the names (or add names), in stead of having a bunch of don't-know-who entries.
When will this feature be available for the rest of us? I really need this! Yes... need this. :-)
Not at all a bad idea. I often find myself sending a one-off only to have the recipient sign on to my google talk. This could result in an akward situation. Suggested contacts is a good alternative as you can easily add the people who did want to keep in touch with.
Matt said on July 15, 2008 7:45 PM PDT:
I like the ability to auto add people I email, but there needs to be a way to separate actual contacts and "everyone else". But, my question is are they going to keep the autoadd feature too?
it's good; but it would be better when I could move contacts from My Contacts to Suggested Contacts, as well
I have a question, how to take out those previous auto added "My Contacts" to "Suggested Contacts", seems no means to do that except delete the contacts from "My Contacts"?!
@Luk:
In my account, "Suggested Contacts" already includes hundreds of addresses automatically added by Gmail. Unfortunately, it doesn't include all those addresses.
You can't move contacts to "Suggested Contacts" because that list is automatically managed by Google.
TBolt said on July 26, 2008 4:25 AM PDT:
i've noticed a lot of email addresses that i'm not familiar with. i'm glad those addresses are not in my own personal contacts listings because I hope we'll soon be able to synch our contacts with our blackberry's. and, when that happens, i don't want my blackberry's address book to be full of spam b.s.
Stacy S said on September 3, 2008 8:55 AM PDT:
Suggested Contacts is ok but how do I stop the suggested contacts from being sync'd into my iphone when I want to update my phone?
I agree about the iphone problem. I spent over an hour going through hundreds of suggested contacts because it filled up the iphone address book. I am wondering HOW to sync the address book again from iphone so it reflects the updated address book.
I hate it that it adds the "suggested contacts" to my iphone
