Technical Problem - Importing Addresses from Apple Contacts Application

I have searched the forums and not found any reference to the problem I have just come across when trying to import email addresses from the Apple contacts data.

I am using SpamSieve 2.9.13 on Mac OS X 10.9.2

The SpamSieve manual describes the process to export the contacts to a VCF file, however this appears to be out of date as the menu item it refers to is no longer there. I selected all contacts in the app and then exported them from the FILE > EXPORT MENU item.

The problem occurs when importing the VCF file, when opening the SpamSieve open dialog box it shows the file but this is greyed out. Because I have the Mac OS hide extensions I thought I would enable the extension to “Visible” to see if this made any difference but alas it did not.

I assume this is something to do with Mavericks and I am happy to wait for the next update to see if this fixes the problem before raising a support call.

Can anyone reproduce this problem?

Best Regard

Terry

Thanks for letting me know. The way you did it should work as well.

How large is the .vcf file? The Import Addresses… feature is currently limited to files that are less than 400KB. If the size is the problem, you could try doing smaller batches of addresses. (I’m working on improving this now that it’s common for .vcf files to be large due to embedded images…)

Also, I should note that, while not wrong, it is not typical to manually import addresses from Contacts because SpamSieve already has a feature to directly access the Contacts database:

The difference is as follows. When you ask SpamSieve to use an address book directly, it will always consider messages from senders in the address book to be good—even if you receive many spam messages that are forged to appear as if they were sent by your friends.

When the addresses are imported to the whitelist, however, they are subject to SpamSieve’s normal whitelist behavior. That is, if Train SpamSieve whitelist is checked, when you receive a spam message from someone on the whitelist, SpamSieve will disable the corresponding whitelist rule. Subsequent messages from that sender will no longer be whitelisted. In short, the address book is safer because it makes sure messages from people in your address book always get through. The whitelist is less safe, but it allows you to block forged spam messages.

VCF file size issues
Hi

Thanks for the quick response, so here is what I found out.

Where you stated that there was a VCF size limit of 400K I was able to confirm that any VCF less that this size was viewable and I was enable to import these without any problem.

However the 400k size is very restrictive, especially for those who have photos of their contacts included. I found that almost all my contacts could not be imported because the average exported VCF file was about 470k in size.

Is this a restriction of the VCF file or SpamSieve?

Cheers

Terry

It’s a restriction due to the way SpamSieve currently reads vCard files. If you send me your e-mail address I’ll send you a beta version of SpamSieve that can handle larger files.

This is addressed in SpamSieve 2.9.14.