Contacts "corrupted"

Over the past week, I have noticed that phone number that I had on my contact list were no longer being shown as saved contacts in WhatsApp, for example. After further investigating, I discovered that the reason behind this is that these contacts had "item1.X-ABLabel:home" added to the end of the phone number, which made it impossible for the phone numbers to be associated to the contact cards.


Initially, I thought it had happened to only a few contacts, so I was editing the contact cards and deleting the "item1.X-ABLabel:home" manually. However, I have just realized that this has affected pretty much all my contacts.


Is there a reason for this to happen, or is there a way for me to correct my contact cards faster or in manner that wouldn't have me editing each one of them individually?

iPhone 13 Pro

Posted on Dec 18, 2022 07:45 AM

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Posted on Jan 29, 2023 06:09 AM

This apparently is happening when you add a work email address or a Gmail address after upgrading your phone and accidentally leave contacts syncing on for the new addresses. I typically only sync my contacts to my main iCloud address and whenever I add a new work email or other email I never select the option to sync those contacts, I believe the culprit is a third-party Gmail account or Microsoft account that I added for work that is trying to fill some things in “smart way “but instead of actually filling out the incorrectly, we are seeing the token that they use in programming to typically dynamically show that thing such as an email or location, etc. Unfortunately I verified that I did have contacts synced from Microsoft and a Gmail account which I don’t need so I turned that off under contacts and I had to go in and manually fix those contacts that were corrupted but on the positive side it gave me an opportunity to clean out the ones I don’t need anymore and it’s a lot easier if you do it on your Mac because it syncs back to your phone. Another note is that you can search for the corrupted strings of text and it will bring up any contacts that have that so it makes it a little easier to sift through the bad ones. I hope this helps.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jan 29, 2023 06:09 AM in response to Matheus Castro

This apparently is happening when you add a work email address or a Gmail address after upgrading your phone and accidentally leave contacts syncing on for the new addresses. I typically only sync my contacts to my main iCloud address and whenever I add a new work email or other email I never select the option to sync those contacts, I believe the culprit is a third-party Gmail account or Microsoft account that I added for work that is trying to fill some things in “smart way “but instead of actually filling out the incorrectly, we are seeing the token that they use in programming to typically dynamically show that thing such as an email or location, etc. Unfortunately I verified that I did have contacts synced from Microsoft and a Gmail account which I don’t need so I turned that off under contacts and I had to go in and manually fix those contacts that were corrupted but on the positive side it gave me an opportunity to clean out the ones I don’t need anymore and it’s a lot easier if you do it on your Mac because it syncs back to your phone. Another note is that you can search for the corrupted strings of text and it will bring up any contacts that have that so it makes it a little easier to sift through the bad ones. I hope this helps.

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Contacts "corrupted"

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