The Case of the Missing Contacts
I just solved a mystery that's been plaguing me for the longest time. My Pocket PCs seem to lose contacts temporarily! When I enter a new appointment in my Pocket PC, I'd like to tap the Attendees field and select the appropriate contact(s) with whom I will be meeting. Many times when I tap the Attendees field to select a contact, the contact is not displayed in the ensuing pick list. If I open up the Contacts application on my Pocket PC, I can find the contact, but since the contact is not available for selection when I tap the Attendees field in the Appointments application, there is no way to associate the appointment with the appropriate contact(s). Today, when I saw a question about this on the HP IPAQ forum, I decided to figure out the mystery.
If I create an appointment on my computer and add attendees, I never have this problem...all my contacts are displayed. So I decided to compare the computer picklist with the Pocket PC picklist. Then I examined some of the contacts that were not included in the Pocket PC picklist, and I finally figured out what was causing the problem.....I discovered that the missing contacts had no email address!
To fix the problem, all I did was enter the word, "None", into the email address field for each of my "missing" contacts. Now all my contacts show up in the Attendee contact picklist on my Pocket PC. Mystery solved!
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An obvious solution but it takes a great mind to find it. I take my hat off.
Kaj.
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Kaj,
I'm going to play around with this some more. The real purpose of assigning attendees to meetings it so you can send out email invitations to the attendees. I'm checking to see if using a dummy email address or text (like None) causes problems....does Outlook attempt to automatically send an email out to the dummy email address? One thing I have noticed is that when I select one of my contacts that has a "None" email address that all the contacts with the "None" email address gets selected. I guess the email address needs to be unique for each contact. So this is starting to get a little complicated.
I'll probably go back and place the person's name in the email file for only those folks that I'll want to associate with an appointment (i.e., my hairdresser, my doctor, etc.)
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Julie,
I tried it out also and when I first assigned an Att to a meeting it worked fine and only this one Att was there. If I opened the meeting later and tabbed the Att then all of the "None Att" would be assigned.
So I will do the same as you suggest and put a name there instead.
Another thing is that it would be better if this feature worked with the name of the contact and left it to me if I would send an invitation by mail or maybe fax or phone.
Kaj.
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I notice that undeliverable messages are left in my pocket pc's outbox, with a message that the email address was not valid. I've searched around the internet for a way to disable this feature, but have come up empty handed. At this point, I don't think there is a way to turn off the automatic email feature. For the bogus email addresses, I can just delete the undelivered messages, but I really don't want emails sent out every time I attach a contact to an appointment. I just really want the contacts associated with appointments, so if I am running late to or need to reschedule an appointment, I can easily locate the contact to call them.
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Yes Julie, I agree with what you say in the last two lines of your message. I often have to rescedule or call the people with whom I have appointments and it would be great if I could open their contact fila from the appointment in the calender.
I cant imagine it to be very difficult to change the program, but maybe nobody just did not ask for it before.
Kaj.
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Well, I'll keep a look out to see if I can figure out or find a solution. If I ever to, I'll post it here.
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