Mailing List Archive: address book duplicates

address book duplicates

Jan 14, 2015, 9:34 PM

Post #1 of 5 (2083 views)

Hi All,

Happy new year and such...

About a month ago I migrated a 15 computer network from ms exchange.
Everything went really smoothly and according to schedule, except for
contacts. countless hours, thoughts, research and experiments have gone
into trying to figure out how to resolve this, the story of which would,
I am sure, thrill you all. However, I shall refrain from wasting your
day with it...

The basics are that when I copy multiple addresses into a thunderbird
address book configured with sogo, some 20% of the contacts are not
uploaded. This seems to throw everything off, and at the next sync
those same contacts are re-uploaded until the collection contains 15-20
thousand contacts then everything stops working. The only thing that
seems able to stop the cycle is to delete the collection, delete the
sogo address book, recreate the collection, import the address book, and
reconnect sogo.

I suspect that the issue stems from character encoding. An example of
why I think that: a contact that displayed ' in name in the outlook
address book was exported as a japanese character in the csv. when I
removed the japanese characters that contact was able to import where it
wasn't before. However, using iconv I can show the whole exported csv
file is utf-8, and some contacts with no special characters at all don't
import. So I was indecisive as to whether it could be character
encoding, but now I am not sure....

I did solve this in a round-about way, but it only works so long as
users only add one contact at a time in the sogo address book, but that
is proving to be inadequate as a solution. Does anyone have any
experience with this problem?

And on importing, I spent many hours trying to get the "load from file"
in the web interface working and never could. I think I searched all
google had to say on it, but I found no solution. Does anyone have a trick?

--
Computerisms
Bob Miller
867-334-7117 / 867-633-3760
http://computerisms.ca

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New Year. New Location. New Benefits. New Data Center in Ashburn, VA.
GigeNET is offering a free month of service with a new server in Ashburn.
Choose from 2 high performing configs, both with 100TB of bandwidth.
Higher redundancy.Lower latency.Increased capacity.Completely compliant.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/gigenet
_______________________________________________
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Re: address book duplicates [ In reply to ]

jk at frozen-doe

Jan 14, 2015, 11:27 PM

Post #2 of 5 (2061 views)

Permalink

Good morning,
Sogo connector is a bit bugged when working with larger amounts of
contacts. It works fine with individual modifications, tho.

Use something else for initial import to Davical and let Sogo to only
dowload everything to Thunderbird later. Once contacts are imported, let
users to use Sogo - it works otherwise fine.

If you have small amount of contacts, you can import about 30 contacts
at once and sync, then repeat.

KDE Addressbook is much better CardDAV client. I would give it a try for
the import.

Good luck!
Josef Kufner

Bob Miller wrote, on 15.1.2015 06:34:
> Hi All,
>
> Happy new year and such...
>
> About a month ago I migrated a 15 computer network from ms exchange.
> Everything went really smoothly and according to schedule, except for
> contacts. countless hours, thoughts, research and experiments have gone
> into trying to figure out how to resolve this, the story of which would,
> I am sure, thrill you all. However, I shall refrain from wasting your
> day with it...
>
> The basics are that when I copy multiple addresses into a thunderbird
> address book configured with sogo, some 20% of the contacts are not
> uploaded. This seems to throw everything off, and at the next sync
> those same contacts are re-uploaded until the collection contains 15-20
> thousand contacts then everything stops working. The only thing that
> seems able to stop the cycle is to delete the collection, delete the
> sogo address book, recreate the collection, import the address book, and
> reconnect sogo.
>
> I suspect that the issue stems from character encoding. An example of
> why I think that: a contact that displayed ' in name in the outlook
> address book was exported as a japanese character in the csv. when I
> removed the japanese characters that contact was able to import where it
> wasn't before. However, using iconv I can show the whole exported csv
> file is utf-8, and some contacts with no special characters at all don't
> import. So I was indecisive as to whether it could be character
> encoding, but now I am not sure....
>
> I did solve this in a round-about way, but it only works so long as
> users only add one contact at a time in the sogo address book, but that
> is proving to be inadequate as a solution. Does anyone have any
> experience with this problem?
>
> And on importing, I spent many hours trying to get the "load from file"
> in the web interface working and never could. I think I searched all
> google had to say on it, but I found no solution. Does anyone have a trick?
>

Re: address book duplicates [ In reply to ]

fsfs at debian

Jan 14, 2015, 11:44 PM

Post #3 of 5 (2061 views)

Permalink

Hi Bob,

are you working with a SoGo or a DAViCal server?

I have used "Load From File" in the DAViCal web interface many times,
but with calendar collections only, with no problem at all, though I
seem to remember that there once was a DAViCal version where this
feature was accidentally broken.

So in order to help, please tell us about the exact software / plugins /
versions you use, and any messages in the error log or printed on the
console. As a first step, leaving out Thunderbird and just using "Load
>From File" would make things simpler; if it does turn out to be more on
the TB / AddOns side of things, turn on debbuging output in TB and start
from a command line, to see what's going wrong where.

Florian

On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 09:34:40PM -0800, Bob Miller wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Happy new year and such...
>
> About a month ago I migrated a 15 computer network from ms exchange.
> Everything went really smoothly and according to schedule, except for
> contacts. countless hours, thoughts, research and experiments have gone
> into trying to figure out how to resolve this, the story of which would,
> I am sure, thrill you all. However, I shall refrain from wasting your
> day with it...
>
> The basics are that when I copy multiple addresses into a thunderbird
> address book configured with sogo, some 20% of the contacts are not
> uploaded. This seems to throw everything off, and at the next sync
> those same contacts are re-uploaded until the collection contains 15-20
> thousand contacts then everything stops working. The only thing that
> seems able to stop the cycle is to delete the collection, delete the
> sogo address book, recreate the collection, import the address book, and
> reconnect sogo.
>
> I suspect that the issue stems from character encoding. An example of
> why I think that: a contact that displayed ' in name in the outlook
> address book was exported as a japanese character in the csv. when I
> removed the japanese characters that contact was able to import where it
> wasn't before. However, using iconv I can show the whole exported csv
> file is utf-8, and some contacts with no special characters at all don't
> import. So I was indecisive as to whether it could be character
> encoding, but now I am not sure....
>
> I did solve this in a round-about way, but it only works so long as
> users only add one contact at a time in the sogo address book, but that
> is proving to be inadequate as a solution. Does anyone have any
> experience with this problem?
>
> And on importing, I spent many hours trying to get the "load from file"
> in the web interface working and never could. I think I searched all
> google had to say on it, but I found no solution. Does anyone have a trick?
>
> --
> Computerisms
> Bob Miller
> 867-334-7117 / 867-633-3760
> http://computerisms.ca
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> New Year. New Location. New Benefits. New Data Center in Ashburn, VA.
> GigeNET is offering a free month of service with a new server in Ashburn.
> Choose from 2 high performing configs, both with 100TB of bandwidth.
> Higher redundancy.Lower latency.Increased capacity.Completely compliant.
> http://p.sf.net/sfu/gigenet
> _______________________________________________
> Davical-general mailing list
> Davical-general@lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/davical-general

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New Year. New Location. New Benefits. New Data Center in Ashburn, VA.
GigeNET is offering a free month of service with a new server in Ashburn.
Choose from 2 high performing configs, both with 100TB of bandwidth.
Higher redundancy.Lower latency.Increased capacity.Completely compliant.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/gigenet
_______________________________________________
Davical-general mailing list
Davical-general@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/davical-general

Re: address book duplicates [ In reply to ]

bob at computerisms

Jan 15, 2015, 6:20 PM

Post #4 of 5 (2059 views)

Permalink

Hi Florian,

Thanks for responding, much appreciated.

> are you working with a SoGo or a DAViCal server?

Davical

> I have used "Load From File" in the DAViCal web interface many times,
> but with calendar collections only, with no problem at all, though I
> seem to remember that there once was a DAViCal version where this
> feature was accidentally broken.

I have used this feature to import ics files as well and it works well
for that. Calendars are working as they should, my problems are purely
a function of address book collections. From what I read on the 'net, I
understand that it should take vcf files for address books. I did read
a handful of accounts of people who said it worked for them, but no
matter what I tried it didn't for me.

> So in order to help, please tell us about the exact software / plugins /
> versions you use, and any messages in the error log or printed on the
> console. As a first step, leaving out Thunderbird and just using "Load
> From File" would make things simpler; if it does turn out to be more on
> the TB / AddOns side of things, turn on debbuging output in TB and start
> from a command line, to see what's going wrong where.

The load from file is a problem independent from Thunderbird. during my
many hours of getting this into a working system I had to delete and
recreate collections many times and then reimport the address books. I
have tried "load from file" at creation time, after creation time, with
appended on and off. I do not have server log entries to paste here
right now, but I can say that there was nothing that inspired me to
understand the problem in them. on the screen, it will show the upload
process, refresh the screen and then show zero items in the collection.

I also tried several variations on curl commands to get the contacts
uploaded, but the best I could get to happen there was that the web
interface would show that there were items in the collection, but no
client, not even carddavmate, would display them. Sorry I don't have
exact copies of what those commands were - please understand that I have
been working at this for minutes or hours pretty much at least once a
day for the last 2-3 weeks. Proper documentation of all the things I
have done would fill a small book by now, and not having expected to
need it I never created it.

In the end, the best way I found to make the import was to convert
everything to vcf and then import it through evolution. This did a good
import, and then I could connect the sogo connector to it after that...

>
> Florian
>
> On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 09:34:40PM -0800, Bob Miller wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> Happy new year and such...
>>
>> About a month ago I migrated a 15 computer network from ms exchange.
>> Everything went really smoothly and according to schedule, except for
>> contacts. countless hours, thoughts, research and experiments have gone
>> into trying to figure out how to resolve this, the story of which would,
>> I am sure, thrill you all. However, I shall refrain from wasting your
>> day with it...
>>
>> The basics are that when I copy multiple addresses into a thunderbird
>> address book configured with sogo, some 20% of the contacts are not
>> uploaded. This seems to throw everything off, and at the next sync
>> those same contacts are re-uploaded until the collection contains 15-20
>> thousand contacts then everything stops working. The only thing that
>> seems able to stop the cycle is to delete the collection, delete the
>> sogo address book, recreate the collection, import the address book, and
>> reconnect sogo.
>>
>> I suspect that the issue stems from character encoding. An example of
>> why I think that: a contact that displayed ' in name in the outlook
>> address book was exported as a japanese character in the csv. when I
>> removed the japanese characters that contact was able to import where it
>> wasn't before. However, using iconv I can show the whole exported csv
>> file is utf-8, and some contacts with no special characters at all don't
>> import. So I was indecisive as to whether it could be character
>> encoding, but now I am not sure....
>>
>> I did solve this in a round-about way, but it only works so long as
>> users only add one contact at a time in the sogo address book, but that
>> is proving to be inadequate as a solution. Does anyone have any
>> experience with this problem?
>>
>> And on importing, I spent many hours trying to get the "load from file"
>> in the web interface working and never could. I think I searched all
>> google had to say on it, but I found no solution. Does anyone have a trick?
>>
>> --
>> Computerisms
>> Bob Miller
>> 867-334-7117 / 867-633-3760
>> http://computerisms.ca
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> New Year. New Location. New Benefits. New Data Center in Ashburn, VA.
>> GigeNET is offering a free month of service with a new server in Ashburn.
>> Choose from 2 high performing configs, both with 100TB of bandwidth.
>> Higher redundancy.Lower latency.Increased capacity.Completely compliant.
>> http://p.sf.net/sfu/gigenet
>> _______________________________________________
>> Davical-general mailing list
>> Davical-general@lists.sourceforge.net
>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/davical-general

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New Year. New Location. New Benefits. New Data Center in Ashburn, VA.
GigeNET is offering a free month of service with a new server in Ashburn.
Choose from 2 high performing configs, both with 100TB of bandwidth.
Higher redundancy.Lower latency.Increased capacity.Completely compliant.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/gigenet
_______________________________________________
Davical-general mailing list
Davical-general@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/davical-general

Re: address book duplicates [ In reply to ]

bob at computerisms

Jan 15, 2015, 6:28 PM

Post #5 of 5 (2052 views)

Permalink

...And to the list this time, sorry.

Hi Josef,

Thanks for your reply.

> Use something else for initial import to Davical and let Sogo to only
> dowload everything to Thunderbird later. Once contacts are imported, let
> users to use Sogo - it works otherwise fine.

Agreed. except for the guy in the office who will always try to add
more contact sources because the program lets him.

> If you have small amount of contacts, you can import about 30 contacts
> at once and sync, then repeat.

I actually found early in this process that in some case two contacts is
all it takes to break it. I also found that the same goes with
deleting; if you select multiple contacts and delete, even as few as
two, it will trigger the duplicates problem...

> KDE Addressbook is much better CardDAV client. I would give it a try for
> the import.

I ended up using evolution, but I will give this a try at next
opportunity...

Thanks for the comments.

>
> Good luck!
> Josef Kufner
>
>
>
> Bob Miller wrote, on 15.1.2015 06:34:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> Happy new year and such...
>>
>> About a month ago I migrated a 15 computer network from ms exchange.
>> Everything went really smoothly and according to schedule, except for
>> contacts. countless hours, thoughts, research and experiments have gone
>> into trying to figure out how to resolve this, the story of which would,
>> I am sure, thrill you all. However, I shall refrain from wasting your
>> day with it...
>>
>> The basics are that when I copy multiple addresses into a thunderbird
>> address book configured with sogo, some 20% of the contacts are not
>> uploaded. This seems to throw everything off, and at the next sync
>> those same contacts are re-uploaded until the collection contains 15-20
>> thousand contacts then everything stops working. The only thing that
>> seems able to stop the cycle is to delete the collection, delete the
>> sogo address book, recreate the collection, import the address book, and
>> reconnect sogo.
>>
>> I suspect that the issue stems from character encoding. An example of
>> why I think that: a contact that displayed ' in name in the outlook
>> address book was exported as a japanese character in the csv. when I
>> removed the japanese characters that contact was able to import where it
>> wasn't before. However, using iconv I can show the whole exported csv
>> file is utf-8, and some contacts with no special characters at all don't
>> import. So I was indecisive as to whether it could be character
>> encoding, but now I am not sure....
>>
>> I did solve this in a round-about way, but it only works so long as
>> users only add one contact at a time in the sogo address book, but that
>> is proving to be inadequate as a solution. Does anyone have any
>> experience with this problem?
>>
>> And on importing, I spent many hours trying to get the "load from file"
>> in the web interface working and never could. I think I searched all
>> google had to say on it, but I found no solution. Does anyone have a trick?
>>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> New Year. New Location. New Benefits. New Data Center in Ashburn, VA.
> GigeNET is offering a free month of service with a new server in Ashburn.
> Choose from 2 high performing configs, both with 100TB of bandwidth.
> Higher redundancy.Lower latency.Increased capacity.Completely compliant.
> http://p.sf.net/sfu/gigenet
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Davical-general mailing list
> Davical-general@lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/davical-general
>

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New Year. New Location. New Benefits. New Data Center in Ashburn, VA.
GigeNET is offering a free month of service with a new server in Ashburn.
Choose from 2 high performing configs, both with 100TB of bandwidth.
Higher redundancy.Lower latency.Increased capacity.Completely compliant.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/gigenet
_______________________________________________
Davical-general mailing list
Davical-general@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/davical-general

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