I have found synching of the PowerMail Address Book and the Apple AddressBook to be inscrutable in the extreme.
SHORT QUESTION: Has anyone figured out a way to keep the PowerMail address book and Apple's AddressBook synchronized reliably? Is there any way to tell if they are actually synchronized? LONG STORY: So what I did (about a week ago) was delete all my PowerMail Address entries, then try to get AdddressBook up to date, and then synchronize them. I have PowerMail set so that PowerMail picks up all changes every time it comes to the front, and doesn't push any changes out, and double- clicking on an item opens it in AddressBook. Somehow, after a week or two, strange addresses started showing up. There were at least 2 addresses in AddressBook that wouldn't show up in PowerMail (I could tell by counting--but could never figure out which ones they were). Also, I started to get some "local" addresses. The only way you can see that they are local is that if you double-click on them, they open in PowerMail's address book, not in AddressBook. I have tried deleting the "local" addresses, and, sometimes, but not always, upon bringing PowerMail to the front the entry from AddressBook would magically appear. Sometimes editing the entry in AddressBook helps "jog PowerMail's brain", sometimes not. So today I had a problem where groups in AddressBook weren't synching with PowerMail--one group had 28 entries in AddressBook, but only 27 in PowerMail. I first tried editing entries, groups, etc in AddressBook and PowerMail's address book to see if this would trigger a sync--but no luck. I then tried deleting every entry in the PowerMail address book, and bringing AddressBook to the front, and then PowerMail to the front. After this I had 2 entries in PowerMail's address book and 700+ in AddressBook. I then tried deleting the address book file in the PowerMail folder. After this, and fiddling with preferences, PowerMail reconstituted all the entries in the AddressBook, but refused to reconstitute the groups. After a bunch more fiddling, suddenly PowerMail did reconstitute the groups. Right now I _think_ that the groups in PowerMail are the same as in AddressBook--but it is almost impossible to tell. And I have 769 entries in AddressBook with "email set" while only 761 entries in the group "Apple Address Book Contacts" in PowerMail, so maybe there is still a problem. So, how do I know whether AddressBook and PowerMail's address book are in sync? and how do I keep them in sync?
