Day 3 Summary . . . Yesterday I revoked Outlook's "application-specific-passwords" using appleid.apple.com (Described in my prior post), then corrected 25 contacts (as described below). As of 10:30 AM this morning 100% of those corrections are still there. I'm cautiously optimistic, that Outlook sync was, in fact, the root cause, but I'll wait until tomorrow to close the book on this. Fingers crossed!
Recap:
- Disabled iOS Device/Mac Sync: To rule-out any possible corruptions caused by syncing phones, iPads, or MacBook with iCloud, I disabled iCloud contact syncing on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Pros, on 3 days ago. In retrospect, that didn't seem to make a difference. Corruptions continued even after they were disabled for days. In any case I decided to leave it disabled and It remains disabled today. If the solution described here works, I'll re-enable it tomorrow.
- Revoke Outlook App-Specific-Password(s): Yesterday I revoked Outlook's "application-specific-passwords" using appleid.apple.com (see prior post for instructions).
- Repair: After I revoked Outlook's app-specific-password, I went back to iCloud.com and corrected all the corrupted contacts I could find.
- Phone Labels: I fixed the labels so that "iPhone" was next to the phone number for someone's iPhone phone number, and not, for example, next to the customer service phone number for my insurance company. There were many errors like this.
- Country: I fixed all the instances where "United States" was replaced by "United Statesitem1.X-ABADR:us"
- Company: I fixed a couple of instances where a business' company name was replaced by "X-ABShowAs:COMPANY"
- Pictures: For this iteration I didn't worry about missing pictures. Most of them had been stripped on Day 2 and I didn't try to replace them. Note: I did replace the picture on my own contact card (aka "My Card" in iCloud contacts) and that photo remains today.
Initial Result: As of today everything looks right. All changes I made yesterday are still there and I don't see any new corruptions.
Working Theory (To Be Confirmed): My working theory is that when Outlook syncs with iCloud, which happens in the ether whether or not it's installed on your phone/iPad/Mac, it somehow corrupts the iCloud contact data, resulting in all sorts of unwanted changes to contacts. Disabling outlook access to iCloud by revoking the outlook application-specific-password seems to have resolved the problem. Again, need to see it stay for a couple days to be sure.
- Note: Assuming this theory is confirmed, this fix will work for folks who don't require Outlook/can live without it. It doesn't really solve the problem for folks who must use it in an Apple ecosystem. It seems like more work has to be done for these two systems to play nice with each other.
Tomorrow
- I will keep an eye on the contacts in iCloud today. If they remain in tact, I will believe that we have discovered the root cause, ie Outlook syncing with iCloud. I will no longer use Outlook, but plan to continue to use MS Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, which don't require iCloud access.
- I'll report back here tomorrow!
David