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Mail seems to be adding contacts without my permission to Address Book. WTF?

iRock1

iRock1

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Apr 23, 2011
1,083
145
So a few days ago I noticed that there were a lot of strange and new names on my address book – a bunch of contacts that I never added. So it turns out that for some weird reason, all the email addressees that I wrote to previously on Mail.app were added automatically and without my approval to Address Book.

The thing is that Addres Book went from my normal 115 contacts to 200. And now I want everything back and normal as it was before.

Can't tell you exactly when and why this happened. I think it is related to the Lion upgrade. However, now I'm trying to fix all this crap with smart groups. So what I did? First I added all the "real" contacts from my old groups to a new one called "old contacts". Then I tried to create a smart group that includes any card that is not in "old contacts", so then I would see all those weird new contacts and delete them in just a blink.

But that didn't work, because the "smart group" shows me everything, just like "all my contacts". I mean apparently Apple ****ed up the Address Book, with some annoying bugs and "smart groups" that even can't include more than two rules! However, I'm here to ask you:

1. How to fix the smart group thing, so I can detect the new unwanted contacts.
2. If it's not possible to work with these dumb groups, how could I easily detect the new and unwanted contacts.
3 . (Bonus) What the hell happened before and how I get all these names and email addresses in my contact list without my permission?

Please help me, because this mess is spreading on all my devices via iCloud (and before via MobileMe).

Cheers.
 
Well I know that my english is not certainly the best one, but come on… Don't be afraid to help the helpless. :D

Cheers.
 
iRock1 said:
Well I know that my english is not certainly the best one, but come on… Don't be afraid to help the helpless. :D

Cheers.
Click to expand...

Do you have iCloud turned on? Perhaps mail is adding the contacts to iCloud and then syncing them to your address book? I would assume there's a setting in mail to fix this.
 
I thought for a moment that the problem would be somethig like that, but I looked the entire preferences in Mail and found nothing. Also I researched, and it turns out that actually there is an option to transfer those mail addresses to AB, but you have to do it manually. :S
 
Anyway, right now my priority is to fix the smart groups thing in Address Book, not to discover what happened or how to avoid the issue again in the future.

Any idea about how to differentiate between the real contacts and those suposedly added by Mail? I need to filter.
 
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