Plaxo is an online address book that's been around for a while. Sometime in the summer this year I decided to pay just under $120 p.a. to have Plaxo synchronize all of my electronic devices that need address data and calendar info, e.g. Laptop, iMac, MacBook Pro, iPad and BlackBerry. My address books were always a bit of a mess and with cool functions that came with the PlatinumSync and Personal Assistant packages in Plaxo, such as the DeDuper, a function that would remove all of the duplicate entries in my address books and merge them intelligently, and 2-way-sync between all devices I was going to be the king of address books. Well, that's what I thought anyway...
After I had installed all Sync Points and kicked off synchronization on each of them I watched with horror how my address book grew from about 1,200 entries to 9,991 entries. That's where Plaxo stopped because it has a limit of 10,000 entries. Relax, I said to myself, kick off the DeDuper and you're back in the game. The DeDuper does not run on your machine but on the Plaxo Servers and my 10,000 entries gave those servers a bit of work to do - it took several days and several attempts before my address book was down to 1,600 entries. That was far from perfect, but hey-ho, better than 10,000 entries, right? Right. Unfortunately though created the intelligent merging algorithm a few surprises for me. Names, that were kept correctly in most address books, had been overwritten by eMail addresses from those devices where I just stored the email address in the address book without updating the name. The German "Umlauts" and other special characters got all "translated" into funny stuff, completely meaningless and wonderfully disruptive to any search function. Address data (postal addresses) got deleted in most cases. To make things a little more entertaining, Plaxo would also present me with error messages such as this one.
My address book is now back to about 6,600 entries and growing. It's one big mess and I can only begin to imagine the many hours of work required to restore it to a half-decent state (since I only realized over time the extent of damage Plaxo had done, I am not quite sure what backup to go back to - and how to keep track of all the changes I have made since).
So, as I said: stay away from Plaxo, you will regret it bitterly if you don't...
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