Google Contacts 04.10

Google Contacts 0.4.10 is now available for download. It includes minor improvements for a simple backup system and new locales.

• Use UTF-8 for Thunderbird address book backups if there is a character which cannot be encoded in a default charset
• Add preference to specify charset for Thunderbird address book backups: gmcont.dump_charset
• Add de-DE and ru-RU locales

Google Contacts determins an encoding for Thunderbird address book backup file according to the value of intl.charset.default. For example, in Japanese Windows and Japanese locale Thunderbird environment, the value is Shift_JIS and the backup file is saved in Shift_JIS encoding. However, in Japanese Windows and English Thunderbird, the value is ISO-8859-1 and cannot handle multi-byte characters. Namely, Google Contacts may create backup in a wrong encoding and you may fail to import the backuped csv file.

If you are in the same trouble, install v0.4.10 and set gmcont.dump_charset to the proper charset by the Config Editor. In order to check the proper charset, export an address book to a csv file by Thunderbird's export function and see the encoding of the file by a text editor which can see a file encoding.