Had a really painful experience with my Nokia N900.

Needed to delete all the contacts from the address book. Did just that. Manually. Didn't find "Delete all" option in time. And did not pay attention to a warning "The contacts will be deleted from server". Now all my contact lists from Skype, Gtalk and MSN Messenger from the last 6 years, are just gone.

More info here: http://www.unwiredview.com/2009/11/2...er-im-servers/

Am I an idiot? Yep. I surely feel that way. But I also feel a bit angry at Nokia too. If you are making a consumer device, you are supposed to make it idiot proof.

Yeah, I know N900 is not really a consumer device. There's one more iteration until they get there. Still. Some better warning would have helped.

"Contacts will be deleted from server?". What do I care?

I had the backups, so everything's supposed to be restored anyway. And why should I worry if N900 is deleting contacts from some server, when I'm deleting 10-30 contacts at a time and most of them are phone numbers from my phonebook. And only a few are my IM contacts?

Problem is, the backup saved only those IM contacts that I merged with phone contacts in address book. All others, brought in there from Skype, Gtalk and MSN are lost.

How about the warning that says "All your Skype, GTalk, MSN contacts will be deleted from Skype, GTalk, MSN servers, and we do not back them up with any available utility. So they will be really truly gone". That one, I would have paid attention to.

Anyway. I try to look at the bright side now. 90% of the IM contacts lost were garbage. I don't even have an idea who they are. Some guy or gal who wanted to talk to me at some point in time about something. Good riddance and good phonebook cleanup.

But the other 10%? I'm really gonna miss those.

Ouch, sorry to hear that.

Really don't see how this is isolated to the N900, this is a "feature" of any if not every chat client... - the linking of contact lists to server.

they'll message you if its important

So if you sign into Gmail.com and click Contacts, it's all gone?????

This would be a good reason to click the "Export" every once in a while : ) (From the Contacts page of Gmail.)

(Note for everyone reading: if you have never done this, do it now!! You'll never know when you might need it. Saves as excel doc. Save the document on your computer somewhere, or email it to yourself )

According to this you can contact Skype and get your contacts restored.

For google talk and MSN they might all still be in your address list.

If you log into MSN Messenger, you can go into the Privacy part somewhere in the options and look at all the people that have you added on their list. Hopefully those are all the people you needed from MSN.

The address book on a phone is not expected to be a chat client. When I delete contacts from my N800, they're not deleted from the server. When I delete contacts on my PC from Evolution, they're not deleted from the server. Each of these apps/contact lists holds my contacts' IM accounts.

I delete my contact from my phone regularly because of sync problems that occur every now and then. It would be absurd if I couldn't do it without deleting my jabber-roaster as well.

@Firebird8 The difference is, that if I am deleting contacts from my IM client or IM aggregator, I fully expect those contacts to be gone. When I am deleting contacts from my phone's phonebook, I do not think of IM clients.

@johnnyrockets911 No, they are not gone if you just signed in to Gtalk or Skype on N900. Actually they are in your phonebook, and it's super convenient. But if you delete Gmail, Skype or any other contact from your N900 "Contacts", they will be deleted from those services servers too.

@sharper Thank you very much. This is the first hope that I may actually have those contacts restored. Thank's again. I will definitely try that

@horus Thank's. I'll try that too.

Wow, this one's a one helpfull community. Waited a day from making the post on my blog and twittering. Didn't get a single helpfull reply. 20 mins here, and I have almost solved them. Wow

Ok, so some people might be saying about poor Staska here, "what an idiot, he didn't read the warning!"

But what about my case? I was merging contacts (something I have had to do several times on my N900), and I accidentally hit an unrelated contact's name (easy to do when you are trying to scroll the list).

Boom, the two unrelated contacts were merged! Fused! Bonded!

Ok, so just un-merge them, right? Wrong! There's no "un-merge" button!

Ok, so just delete the incorrect fields from one of the contacts!

"Warning: Contacts will be deleted from server!"

Yikes! Help!

So I agree with Staska. There's some serious problems here. Definitely not consumer-ready.