[HOWTO] Import Gmail contacts into eCloud

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21

It looks like the file is not conforming to the vCard standard which expects:

  1. one white space as continuation line (RFC6350, page 5)
  2. newlines in field values encoded as =0D=0A= (according to archived document vCard v2.1).

Anyhow, I pushed a changed which should handle also these cases.

22

I had a problem with the import.
Turned out it was because of the vCard version (2.1).
With this: GitHub - jowave/vcard2to3: Convert vcards from version 2.1 to version 3.0
I was able to translate to version 3 and import the contacts.

23

very good hint to the conversion tool!

I managed to import my contacts from my Samsung Android 13 device after converting the .vcf file, seeing ā€œ3 errorsā€ reported on import.

Any idea where to see details like line numbers within the file, where some issue was detected?

I also downloaded it again after import. When comparing it to the initial imported vcf file, I now have 9 ā€œBEGIN:VCARDā€ less!

Analysis showed, that the import truncates notes with when a comma is detected in it - apparently you need to escape commas in values with a backslash before importing the .vcf file!

24

These are comma separated values.

You can take a copy of a good .vcf and import it into a spreadsheet as a .csv file.

Possibly you will see some ā€œnon standardā€ fields and experiment ?

25

Well, the rules are clear regarding how to format values in a VCARD format.
But Samsung does not care. Also ā€œ\nā€ as a line break within notes or addresses is not allowed in VCARD 2.1, the format Samsung produces.

Of course, I can use some advanced editing of the exported file using some regular expressions to fix that stuff. But it is just so bad how difficult it is to move away from Google without loosing parts of your data - and donā€™t expect it to get better for calendar entries either.

26

thatā€™d be quite a bug for Samsung, did you tell em?

27

Well, it turned out to be not the fault of Samsung!

It was my fault using some Python script referenced in the forum to
convert VCARD2.1 to VCARD3.0 format. This is faulty!

Using an Android mobile both contact apps from Samsung and from Google
export to VCARD2 format, while importing to the Murena cloud/eCloud only
can deal with VCARD3 format.

The solution was to use Googles web interface
ā€œhttps://contacts.google.com/ā€; in the upper right corner next to the
printer symbol there is the symbol to export contacts; use option ā€œvCard
(for iOS contacts)ā€ to export to VCARD3 formatted file.

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