Junk Symbols in Google Contacts

[dutchtrumpet]

Has anyone else gotten the little rectangular junk symbols in their google contacts? My gApps account and my wife's gmail account both have them.

[rj5620]

yes, I am just manually deleting them, pain in the A#$ though.

[Jeff DLB]

Are the symbols only at the end of fields, or anywhere? If at the end, I wonder whether those symbols are caused by the conflicting ways that Linux, Windows and MacOS mark the ends of lines (via carriage return and/or line feed characters). WebOS has a Linux kernel. The software should be smart enough to account for these differences, but I see this sort of thing when I email from certain people.

How did you populate your Gmail contacts--imported from MS Outlook?

[dutchtrumpet]

Originally Posted by Jeff DLB

Are the symbols only at the end of fields, or anywhere? If at the end, I wonder whether those symbols are caused by the conflicting ways that Linux, Windows and MacOS mare the ends of lines (via carriage return and/or line feed characters). WebOS has a Linux kernel. The software should be smart enough to account for these differences, but I see this sort of thing when I email from certain people.

How did you populate your Gmail contacts--imported from MS Outlook?

Good call...they sync from Mac address book to google contacts via Spanning Sync

[greenoyster]

Search on Google for "Preserve Gmail compatibility" -- Spanning Sync inserts those characters unless you have that option on. Happens on the iPhone too.

[dutchtrumpet]

I owe you a beer!

[Mikest]

I had the same problem but I cleaned them up manually on the phone. Not surprisingly I was using SpanningSync as well. Thanks for the heads up GreenOyster.

[em3]

I too was experienceing the same junk characters on info that was syncing and ending up on my PRE. I spoke with Byron at SpanningSync today and he provided a quick solution that avoids having to engage in the tedious manual deletion of the junk characters and best of all, results in a permanent fix. Here are the instructions:

You can resolve this by using
Spanning
Sync's Gmail compatibility mode when syncing contacts:

* Open Spanning Sync
* Select the Contacts tab
* Uncheck and then re-check the "Sync contacts" checkbox
* Choose "Preserve Gmail compatibility" and click "OK"
* Make some small change to one of your contacts in Address Book (to
force an update on the next sync)
* Sync

Everything worked after syncing my mac Address Book with google via the method above, I simply manually sync my contacts on the PRE, waited a bit, and then checked again and all of the junk characters were gone.

Good luck,
Lou