This post is about Syncing all my contacts. Ok, so I have a lot of contacts, they are all in different places.
all I really want is to have one list of names, email addresses and phone numbers.I want this list in my phone and on all the services that I use. never gonna happen. but at least I can be a bit more organised.
I use outlook to manage my contacts –  all my contacts are synced to my phone – and new contacts from my phone are added to my contacts list.
I have MSN contacts, I have Hotmail contacts, I have outlook contacts and I have phone contacts.
I also have myspace, facebook, bebo, digg, youtube, flickr, stumble, delicious, and a host of online forum contacts.
I need a way to get all the contacts from all these places into the one place.
ive chosen my hotmail contacts to be that place. purely because they are shared between msn messenger and hotmail.

I had to export all my outlook contacts as a csv file and then import them into hotmail, before I did this I made sure all my phone contacts were synced with outlook. I then deleted all my phone contacts and my outlook contacts. then I had to sort through the combined hotmail and outlook contacts, inside hotmail, and merge the duplicate ones. once this was done I had a single list of all my contacts in hotmail.

If you get the outlook connector plugin from microsoft you can then use your hotmaill contacts in outlook.
there is a trick to getting outlook to use hotmail contacts as your default contacts though

tools > addressbook
then inside the addressbook
tools > options

You’ll see the options there.

Once your hotmail contacts are set as the default in outlook you can then sync up your phone again. this way you have all your contacts in your phone.

Every time you add a contact to your phone it will be added to your hotmail contacts when you next sync.

Now if I could get my social networking contacts merged in there too id have everything. the only problem with that is that I have a load of contacts that I dont actually know on these sites, so id want to have two lists – one for ‘everyone’ and one for ‘people I actually know’ and id only want to sync the ‘people I actually know’ to my phone.