Importing vs Syncing icloud Contacts - keeping groups, etc

I’m trying to unravel the possible mess I made with contacts in eM Client. I originally imported all my contacts from Outlook into the Local folders on eM Client. I was able to retain the Categories and Groups I had setup. But then I discovered I couldn’t easily sync with my iPhone (at least not bi-directionally). I have now started syncing my iPhone Contacts to the iCloud and added my iCloud as an account in eM Client for contacts. Now in my contacts bar in the left nav bar I see my local folders and, separately, my iCloud contacts. I have 3 questions.

  1. Should I somehow be syncing these (e.g. should the iCloud contacts “import” onto my local folder) or do I just abandon the local folder and work with eM Client as simply an interface to the contact list stored on the server?

  2. My 2 lists (the local list and the contacts from my iPhone now on iCloud) are slightly out of sync. Any easy way to sort by most recently modified contacts or something so I can manually get all the changes from one place into the other to start using whichever answer comes from #1 above?

  3. In the iCloud set of entries I can’t see groups or categories so no way to just view my contacts except in one big lump. If the answer to #1 is to abandon the local folder and just work with the iCloud set of contacts, I really need a way to view the groups/categories so I can limit what I see.

Hi Nicole, yes the answer is to abandon the local folder and simply use the iCloud folder.
However groups are unfortunately not supported on iCloud, using this Contacts service, your groups (that you may have setup on iCloud) are used as distribution lists instead of different contacts folder.

We hope this will be improved in future, however this is unfortunately not our fault and we would love to improve this if it was possible.

If you right click your columns in the contacts view and select “Columns configuration” you should be able to add the option to sort by “Updated”, to see which contacts were updated recently, or even by “Created”.

Hope this is any help,
Paul.

Thanks for the reply Paul. Bummer to hear that you can’t enable sorting by groups or categories but sounds like its out of your hands. Thanks for the other explanations - you completely answered my questions!

Hi again Nicole, thank you for understanding, glad I could help, let us know if you come across any other questions or issues, we’ll be happy to help.

Thank you,
Paul.