I got a lot of flack when I sent out contact update requests via Plaxo recently. Dear friends, I’m sorry for spamming you. I have received karmic retrobution.
So when I decided to switch jobs recently, I needed a quick and easy way to get all my contacts in one place. I’m not very good at updating my address book. I usually just count on the predictive typing feature to remember all the email addresses I’ve ever used. I knew most people found Plaxo to be annoying but I also know a ton of people on there so I figured I’d give it a shot. Anyway, I took the time to add all my friggin contacts into Plaxo online so that they’d be somewhere central so I could update my address book at my new job.
I finally got around to synching my plaxo contact list with my Mac address book the other day. I downloaded the Mac toolbar and everything seemed to work just fine. This was a couple days ago. Yesterday, I opened my address book and began the process of creating a folder for contacts I was going to synch to my new phone. (You’ll remember that I also recently lost all the contacts from my phone. Yay!) I started sorting my contacts and everything was running smoothly. Then something happened. I went away from this project to something a little less tedious for a bit and when I came back, MY ADDRESS BOOK WAS COMPLETELY EMPTY! I checked Plaxo and OMS IT WAS EMPTY TOO! Where did all my data go?
I’ve learned through many data loss situations not to freak out until absolutely necessary. There is usually a way to recover. So I calmed myself down and sent an email to Plaxo:
I recently switched jobs. Before leaving my last job, I input all of my contacts (hundreds!) into Plaxo Online. When I got to my new job, I installed the Mac toolbar to sync the contacts to my Mac address book. I did this a couple days ago and it worked fine. Then all the sudden my contacts disappeared in my address book. I tried to resync. Now all my contacts are gone from my address book AND plaxo online. These are contacts I’ve collected over years and years and don’t have saved anywhere else. Please help!!
And their response:
Hello Micki,
I’m sorry you’re having difficulty.
Micki, from your previous email I understand that you have recently changed your job. After quitting your previous job, people from that company may have deleted all of your contacts and other information from their computers. As you have synchronized your Plaxo account with that computer all the information present on your Plaxo account is also deleted.
However I can undelete your address book, but restoring of contact entries (Data recovery) is a premium feature. We only restore the contacts for the Premium subscribers. Since you are not a Plaxo premium member, I am unable to undelete your contacts from my end. So I suggest you to subscribe for the Plaxo Premium services and send us an email to vip@plaxo.com, requesting un deletion of address book. After receiving your email we will undelete your deleted contacts.
In order to subscribe for the Premiums services kindly login to your Plaxo online account at http://www.plaxo.com/signin, then click on the link “My Account” and then on “Your Premium services Summary” and then on “Start FREE trial”.
Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns!
Best regards,
Imran
Plaxo Customer Care
Yes, Imran, I have a question or concern! Why are you holding my data hostage? What kind of scam are you running?
Note: The scenario Imran outlined as a possible reason for the erasure of all my data is not possible. I never synched to my old work computer. Like I said, I wasn’t good at keeping my address book updated. I entered all the contacts manually right before leaving.
Plaxo Premium costs 5O BUCKS A YEAR! You pay them 50 bucks so they can spam all your friends and make them hate you. The “FREE trial” lasts for 30 days. As soon as I get my data back, I’m backing it up and running as far away from Plaxo as possible. Plaxo is teh sux0r.
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this calls for a channel 5 whistle blower investigation! so bullshit. Plaxo can suck my left tit. o.
Thanks for the heads up. I”ve just completely deleted my account with Plaxo
Hi Micki, Sorry you had such a bad experience. I’d like to figure out what happened to your account; if you could drop me a line that would be awesome – don’t worry, I won’t try to make you pay $50
Thanks!
-Mark
Heh, got to love that technical support! I once sent e-mail to our own technical support (Plaxo) about how our forums were being spammed and got a form response about how Plaxo was not responsible for spamming (You know the Plaxo = spam schtick). I and the head of support had a good laugh about this miscommunication.
That sort of happens when someone from support misreads your predicament. You should contact Mark and have him help with your predicament. If you recently lost your data, Plaxo can roll back those changes and restore your AB to a previous state. I haven’t had this happen to me (I’m a Mac person too) yet *knocks on wood*.
The weird thing about synchronization in general is that if your address book gets deleted and synced then that deletion will propagate everywhere that syncs with that system (in this case, Plaxo). For instance, say your phone is synced with your address book via iSync and your address book is synced with Plaxo through the Mac client. A deleted phone address book will wipe out your Mac OS X address book which will propagate to Plaxo’s servers and wipe it out there and then… That’s why it’s good to have backups! (Once while testing something internally, I made the mistake of using my own address book instead of a test one. I had this horrible bug that caused all my contacts to duplicate in a particularly nasty manner which I still haven’t recovered from because I synced it with Plaxo and dotMac before I realized what I had done. Doh! BTW, didn’t you read the Read Me for the Plaxo Mac client? You’re supposed to back up your Mac OS X Address Book before using Plaxo.
j/k I didn’t either.)
OTOH, a fringe benefit was the time my Powerbook was stolen and my backups had failed (except for one real old one). I reinstalled on a replacement and synced with Plaxo and… it was like having Backup and dotMac for free, for my address book at least!
OK, you plaxo people are really smart for trolling blogs and leaving public comments. But just like I didn’t read the Read Me, you obviously didn’t read my blog. I did not have anything in my Mac address book to back up! I was using Plaxo as the only storage place for my contacts while I switched computers. Whatever deletion happened was on that end. Anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore. Mark was very helpful and he emailed me a miliion times yesterday to try to solve the problem. Mind you, I wasn’t really interested in solving the problem, I just wanted my data back. He helped me with that too. And I am no longer a Plaxo subscriber. So friends, I’m sorry about all the spam. It won’t happen again.
I did read your blog and I was just giving a hypothetical. If you read my comment there was a “just kidding” next to the “backup” comment. But if you want to accuse me of “trolling blogs” when I simply followed this link you posted on ValleyWag than feel free. I’m just an engineer and I thought you’d find it polite if I stated my bias up front (that I am an employee of Plaxo) instead of doing some real trolling or astroturfing.
I found via boingboing https://www.plaxo.com/opt_out
where you can permanently opt out of receiving any emails without upgrading.
Terry, I use the word “trolling” a bit differently than its original context. It’s what I do all day long. Anyway, I do appreciate Mark reaching out and you as well. Mark spent a lot of time with me directly trying to solve the problem. Unfortunately, I really just don’t want to be a part of what Plaxo is doing. Good luck!