Update
Mike Mongeau, a forum moderator at Microsoft Answers says as follows, I would point out the error I experienced was with one of the custom fields and not date but I think the date field will be the most common of the two. If this doesn’t work for you move beyond the update section for another potential remedy:
Everyone: I’ve done some digging and believe I know the cause behind the error code. It seems Google contacts allows for birthday fields of many formats, including something like Month, DD, YY. So, a birthday like “October 17, 11″ will cause a sync failure. The phone sees the year not as 2011, but actually as year 11. It naturally balks at this. Here are some other notable findings with this:
What’s odd is that Google doesn’t allow you to enter birthdays in this format (at least, not any longer). Instead, to get myself into a “bad state” I had to import my contacts with the birthday field entered like this. Meaning you guys either (1) imported your contacts or (2) had entered these birthday values in some older interface of Google’s contacts.
This isn’t a regression. Any contacts with this birthday value will, in fact, fail to sync pre-Mango – just the error code isn’t shown.
To fix: simply edit the birthday field of your contacts in this format (or delete) to be MM, DD, YYYY. Finally, remove and re-add your Google account.
The Problem
After installing Windows 7.5 (Mango) on my HTC Mozart Windows Phone all worked well for a couple of days. I noticed that Gmail was sometimes not synchronizing but put it down to poor cell coverage. I began to receive calls showing the number and not the contact, and then, when trying to make a call one day I found all my contacts missing.
I searched for solutions online. I found similar complaints however these were for the earlier version of Windows 7, 7.5 better known as Mango had only just been released and surely, the problems in the older version of the software had not been brought forward to the new?
They had.
I followed several suggestions on forums and blog posts but failed to solve the problem. I raised my question on Microsoft Answers but that, at time of writing this still offered no solution. Strange name for a website “Microsoft Answers” because they never bloody do.
The Solution For Me
To understand the solution it’s best you know what I think the cause is first. That way you may find a better solution for your own particular set of circumstances: I believe the cause is WP7′s inability to understand Gmail’s Custom field used in their contacts list to store miscellaneous information. At first I thought it might be some of the character sets in use in my contacts. I have Asian, Eastern European, Russian, Greek and several other contacts all of whom have shared their Vcards with more information in their own characters, but after summarily deleting these Microsoft remained incapable of importing them.
Some had large quantities of information, so I targeted these next, but still, Microsoft could not import them.
I was left with a few that had HTML tags which I removed and still Microsoft could not import Gmail contacts.
I then removed all Custom fields in Gmail and at last, Microsoft managed to import the records. So this is my solution and these are the steps I took to successfully import Gmail Contacts into my Windows 7 HTC Mozart Mobile Phone.
- Export all Gmail contacts to Outlook CSV
- Open CSV in your editor (I used Excel)
- Delete the Notes column (in Excel click the top of the column and hit delete)
- Save your CSV
- Import CSV into Windows Live Contacts (this maybe unnecessary but I figure if Microsoft Phone cannot read Microsoft Windows Live contacts then I may as well have bought brick)
- Delete all contacts in Gmail (Don’t panic, Gmail has an easy to use recovery feature if you screw up)
- Export from Windows Live to CSV
- With Gmail Contacts empty, use Gmail’s import utility to import the contacts you exported in the above step from Windows Live
- Go to your Microsoft Windows 7 Phone and Synchronise
That did it for me; I hope it helps you.
Epilogue
Chrissakes Microsoft get this sorted. I can see people dumping your phone because of this one tiny-itty-bit of a problem and your choice to ignore complaints exacerbates the rush for alternatives. I decided against iPhone because I have Windows everything around me, I chose not to go for a Galaxy S because a friend complains the O/S and programs often crash. I am happy with the decision but frankly, if I can’t get access to my contacts the iPhone or Android make much more sense.
Thank you so much for this. I searched everywhere for an answer and this delivered.
This did not work for me unfortunately.
However, I was able to import the Gmail contacts into my Live account and was able to sync them via Live.
Gmail sync is still broken and I prefer to keep my contacts in Gmail not Hotmail.
You missed the final steps – delete the contacts in Gmail, export from Windows Live, then import them into Gmail and you will be sorted.
Unfortunately, I followed your instructions precisely.
This won’t work for me.
As a matter of fact, Gmail does not sync even with 1 contact. A simple contact with just a phone number.
I followed these directions exactly before and after my hard resets and rollbacks.
Without the Mango update, everything works flawlessly.
I am convinced that Mango broke this Gmail sync mechanism pretty bad.
Hi Alkanism, I have added an update from Mike that covers a problem with the date field. Personally I find Mango so much better that in your position I would try again, I realise you may have gone though enough pain already, but I’m just sayin, thats all.
Sounds like a good solution,
But it doesn’t work for me at all.
when I export my contacts from google to a csv file and open it in excel, it’s very messed up and there are notes from android (starred) and facebook (fb id:00001) in there but not in one particular column..
and when I try to impot it to hotmail it says file empty…
…even when I add a new contact to gmail and export only this one and try to import it to hotmail.
update: I had to choose import from windows live in hotmail, not from outlook csv. worked now. thanks for this solution.
I am having trouble importing my contacts from Gmail. I delete contacts til I had less than 1500, exported the contacts, deleted the “notes” and I cannot import them into hotmail. Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Hi Chris,
Try exporting all of them again, this time to “Outlook CSV” then go to http://www.live.com and select “Contacts” from the “Hotmail” menu (Top left just to the right of the Windows Live logo). The click “Manage” and “Import” and you will see “Outlook” as a choice (bottom right of the icons). Click this and select “Microsoft Outlook (using CSV)” and with luck it should work.
If it doesn’t I suspect you may have a problem with the Date field as per Mike Mongeau’s suggestion. You will need a way to check for invalid dates and remove them. If you are an excel whizz you will find this useful:-
http://www.vbaexpress.com/kb/getarticle.php?kb_id=323
If not, you will need to hire one or convince Microsoft to use error checking in their code, a simple try..catch would have averted this issue.
Thanks for the help. I still couldn’t get them to import into hotmail but after deleting all “notes” and “birthdays” I was able to re-import them into google and they synced up on my phone. finally!
Worked perfectly for me. This is just what I was needing to know. I was ready to abandon Gmail. That would have been a nightmare! Thanks so much. God bless.
DUDE…you should be paid for this by Microsoft. God it shows how inflexible their soft/hardware truly is that it fails because of one simple thing (which could have been ignored by the sync and no one would have noticed). Instead, it just fails and doesn’t tell you why it failed. This means MS=Fail. I like mango no tho!
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I tried few things. I have 2 older gmail accounts that don’t sync contacts AT ALL.
I do have 1 new gmail account where it syncs the contacts with no problems.
I don’t know how relevant this is, but my other two gmail accounts have been open since the existence of gmail began, whereas the new one is pretty recent.
I unfortunately did the copying the contacts to the Live account, even though I really don’t want to keep em there… will keep trying things. If I hit gold I’ll definitely let you know!
It worked for me – the birthday issue!
Thanks!!!
Thanks Paul, I think dates are the main issue.
I tried things that you suggest, but nothing worked. I even deleted all contacts from gmail and try to sync but failed… again…
Sorry to hear that Mario. Invalid dates are the most common reason for the error but some character sets in the notes field have caused a problem too. In nearly all cases exporting from Google to CSV then importing to Hotmail and then emptying gmail contacts and importing directly from Windows Live has fixed both issues. If this hasn’t worked for you and you do eventually find the cause please let us know.
Kinf Regards,
Martyn
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Thanks for htis. Worked for me. Just as in your case, in 7.0 it was fine, Mango seemed to break it. Have now got it all synching just fine. Appreciate your help!
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Didn’t work for me either, but that’s because I couldn’t get Excel to divide the columns on the .csv (the used to be a tool for that on the older version of Excel, but I couldn’t find it). Did discover, however, that Windows doesn’t like alternate tags on phone numbers – in my case, all my contacts are tagged according to what operator they use, so I know who I can call for free. WP can’t read those numbers, only those tagged Mobile, Home, Work and the likes.
Hope this helps some of you ;)
HI all, I got this error 80070057 with my Nokia Lumia 810. The only thing I needed to do was that I uncheched “sync contacts” in the sync settings. This got my email synced! Then I re-checked the “sync contacts” again, and it seems to work!
The only change I did with contacts was that I deleted one email address from one contact (leaving that contact’s details completely empty). And when I rebooted my Nokia, this problem occurred.
Your solution about unchecking the contacts and re-syncing worked for me. Thank you!
Great work. Thanks so much.
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