Note 3 Incompatibility with Mobilelife - new Contact Sync needed

[Zogundar]

I discovered today that I was unable to sync my old phone's contacts that had been sync'd with Mobilelife. At least via the normal synchronization. I eventually discovered I was able to export a file, put that on my phone, and then import it and get my contacts on there that way. Apparently T-mobile is trying to get rid of Mobilelife in favor of Google solutions.

My problem with this is I have no desire to mix or integrate Google contacts into my phone contacts (Indeed, that was their initially offered solution which I declined.) However with the current system, there seems to be no way to automatically backup my contacts (I'm not sure how to manually do it either as my old phone's software is almost entirely incompatible with the Note 3.) Is there some way to automate this still, or should I just back things up every time I edit my contact information? And if it's the latter, how do I do that?

 

[Jessica Z]

I just got a Nexus 5, having the same issue. I really don't want every single e-mail address i've ever e-mailed before showing up in my contacts and i'd really like to be able to still sync with T-Mobile. Hope someone has an answer.

 

[sonic1519]

I don't know if this will help. You didn't mention who you used for email service.
I had the same problem. I use one POP account and outlook.com as my default account.
i set up the outlook as microsoft exchange activesync. when i did everything synced both ways
all contacts and calendar events. hope this helps....

 

[Jessica Z]

I think it's safe to assume that Zogundar and i both use Gmail, thus the automatic mixing of Google contacts with our original phone contacts. I was fortunate enough to have a T-Mobile associate transfer my contacts from my old phone to the Nexus (although there were a bunch of duplicates i had to weed through, grrr), so i didn't have to worry about initially recovering them. I just didn't want to sync and back everything up with Google. I was impatient, so what i ended up doing was finding a way to at least separate my phone contacts from the contacts i already had through Gmail.
Zogundar, i don't know if you'll find this to be a viable solution, but when you back up your contacts with Google, thus mixing all of your contacts together, log into your Gmail account, there's a drop down tab in the left corner where it says "Gmail." Select "Contacts." There you can edit your contacts and create separate folders for your phone contacts, e-mail contacts, whatever you want.
Then go into your phone "People" app, tap the menu, then "Contacts to display." Tap "Customize," hit the drop down on your gmail account, then select the specific folder with your phone contacts. At the very least, this way you can keep your contacts organized and separate with the benefit of them being automatically backed up.