Plaxo for Mac does not sync every field/option of the Apple Address Book (at least for now). However, we do sync the most commonly used fields and support a rich collection of contact data.
- For emails, we base our sync off of the labels given to your contact's info. We sync fields with the labels 'home', 'home 2', 'home 3', 'work', work 2', 'work 3'. So you can sync a total of six email addresses per contact using Plaxo.
- For phone numbers, we sync fields with the labels 'home', 'home 2', 'work', 'work 2', 'other', 'home fax', 'work fax', 'other fax', 'mobile', 'work mobile', 'pager', 'SkypeIn', 'assistant'.
- For addresses, we sync fields with the labels 'work', 'home', 'other'.
- For URLs, we sync fields with the labels 'work', 'home'.
- For related people, we sync fields with the labels 'assistant', 'manager', 'spouse'
- For dates, we sync fields with the label 'anniversary'.
- For AIM IM fields, we sync fields with the label 'main'
When using Plaxo to synchronize your data, it is imperative that each of the above referenced label/field combos are used at most once. Otherwise, through the normal operation of keeping your data in sync it is very likely that you would lose data on the fields where a label was used more than once. e.g., Do not have two phone numbers entered for a contact each with the label 'home'. Eventually, one of them may be deleted. If you have a contact with multiple phone numbers, use one of the labels mentioned above at most once, or choose a unique label name that does not match one of the field labels that Plaxo for Mac uses. Unique labels can be applied to multiple entries of the same type of data without problem since Plaxo will not attempt to synchronize these fields.
In addition to the above mentioned data types and labels, Plaxo for Mac synchronizes the following information:
- title
- first name
- last name
- middle name
- name suffix
- maiden/family name
- nickname
- birthday
- company name
- department name
- job title
- notes
- whether the contact is marked as a person or a company
Plaxo Categories are synchronized to your Address Book Groups and vice-versa (Smart Groups excluded).
In addition to this, Plaxo for Mac will sync IM fields for AIM, MSN, Jabber, ICQ, Yahoo!, Skype, Google, Other with the labels 'home' and 'work'. Unlike the previously referenced fields where Plaxo for Mac requires a unique label for a given type of contact info, the various IM fields can have multple 'home' and 'work' labels per IM service kind. e.g. it is okay to have two AIM accounts each with the label 'home'.
Notable information that is not synchronized (at the present time) includes:
- what regional formatting is applied to an address
- whether or not the the contact's name display has been customized to display first name / last name or last name / first name
