Re: [Geary] import / sync contacts

[Adam Dingle <adam medovina org>]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 1:55 AM, Robert Schroll <rschroll gmail com> wrote:

On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 10:35 PM, Benjamin Kaiser <benjaminjkaiser gmail com> wrote:

Is there any way to import or sync a list of contacts? From a csv file or something?

At the moment, Geary only harvests contacts from the messages it sees in your accounts.

Or a way to edit raw data files?

The list if contacts is saved in the ContactTable in ~/.local/share/<account>/geary.db. If you feel like writing some SQL, you could merge in additional contacts. But doing so is completely unsupported -- if it breaks, you get to keep both halves.

Geary seems to be missing any form of contact management, and it doesn't appear the contacts are showing up inside gnome-contacts.

The plan is to use libfolks to get contacts from your favorite address book application. See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=714160 for details.

One more note.  When we started the Geary project at Yorba back in 2011, we always assumed that we'd need to write a contact manager and/or integrate with gnome-contacts very early on.  Just a few days ago I was talking with Jim Nelson (the primary author of Geary) and we were remarking how pleasantly surprised we were that 4 years later we weren't really missing that feature despite not ever having implemented it.  The point is that when you need to write to someone, Geary autocompletes email addresses by harvesting them from your cached email addresses... and 98% of the time that's simply good enough.  I find that in the rare case where Geary can't autocomplete an address I have to go look it up somewhere else, but that almost never happens, especially since I generally tell Geary to keep at least the last 6 months of email cached for each of my accounts.

Now, don't get me wrong: I still think that some sort of gnome-contacts integration would be nice to have.  But in my opinion it just turned out to be far less important than we originally thought it would be for a lightweight email client.

adam