I'm just switching from N9 to Sailfish X and am trying to determine if People app can be limited to synchronizing contacts from Exchange account.

I've only added one of my two Exchange accounts that I had on my N9. I loved the Contacts on that and how only my Exchange contacts that appear in Outlook would be synched to phone.

On Sailfish X in People, it appears that every person is listed and that was over 1000 from just the first account I added. I still have more to add and have stopped. It's almost like a denial of service attack in my People list. If I type "M", I have to do more scrolling to find the right person than I did in all of my combined contacts in the N9's Contacts app.

Is there a way to modify the list of people that appears without having to one-by-one long-press a name, select "delete", then wait five seconds for that one delete to happen? And I don't want any new person to whom I send an email to show up automatically, either. If I want to add a contact, I'd love to be able to do it on my work computer in Outlook and not have the phone be quite as eager to help me.

Thank you for guidance.

[edit] - Alright, I figured out how to use the pulley, "select contacts", then start deleting en masse. But I'd still like to know if there's a way to only have actual "contacts" on Exchange server come over to phone. I saved none on SIM (precisely because Exchange server handles all of that, regardless of what SIM, phone, OS, computer, etc.)

Sorry, I don't get it. How did you get the 1000+ contacts onto your phone? You must have done something, they would not pop up out of nowhere. I had to add every single one of my ~60 contacts manually.

EDIT: Oh, and that automatic adding of contacts I send emails to. I do not get that either. I have never used that feature and would never use it so I never even looked for such an option. I looked now and... could not find it. Not in Sailfish anyway. I found it on my N900.

Hi. Thanks for helping.

It has something to do with adding an Exchange account. I flashed the phone, once I got into Sailfish, went through the tutorial, then downloaded the Exchange and predictative text apps. I changed my cellular data and MMS messaging center (I have T-Mobile in the U.S. and needed to make changes per deprecated's solution). I then added the Exchange account. I had the phone sync Calendar, Contacts (sync: Two-way), and Email.

I finished that, set the phone down a few minutes to go do another task and let it sync up the content. I came back and had 99+ emails listed in the notification area, my calendar appointments, then went to People to get a feel for that and to click on someone to send a test MMS to make sure my MMS works properly. It was at that point that I discovered the 1058 contacts it imported.

When I type a first letter, I get brought to all of these email addresses. People I may have emailed once like ten years ago are listed. I do see Exchange contacts that will be just a person's first and last name. For instance, I see my own Exchange contact in the list. I can click on my contact and see all of my email addresses, phone numbers, etc. But if I go back to just typing my first letter, People gives me results not only with my contact, but also my email address because it pulled that from my emails somehow.

That is all I did. It was like the third task I did on the phone. I hadn't even made a call or sent a test MMS yet.

I hope that helps. Thanks for taking the time to assist.

I suggest you go back to your PC and check the contacts list there. I suspect you have the 1000+ addresses in your personal contacts, due to your mail client misconfiguration.

I have one Exchange account for work. There are dozens of contact lists maintained by the IT department and one personal list. I keep the personal one empty and never had any sync problem.

Check in outlook if those are from the 'Suggested Contacts' folder. From your description it seems that you have this enabled and is collecting all those contacts for you.

Check also if you have Skype for Business/Lync added in outlook. This could have also similar effect depending on the settings you chose.

@Pichlo - Thank you. It has been the same contacts for four N9s and I have not had this problem. Hmmm.

@Saturn - I paused after typing the above and checked. I went into a folders view rather than just the common view Outlook 2013 provides. Sure enough, there is a Suggested Contacts folder. Lo and behold, a ton of contacts there. In fact, they were suspiciously familiar...like the ones on my phone. Hmmm.

Yes. I deleted all of those. I went into options and I don't have suggested contacts turned on in this Outlook, but probably some other computer iteration I had that enabled by default and I never even knew it. THANK YOU! I will now wait for my XX to sync and all should be well. Thank you!