Exchange ActiveSync won't sync contacts on Android

Hi,

My problem just reoccurred. I just noticed that contacts on my phone are out of sync with outlook.com again. Any changes that I make on my phone are not syncing, so I am stuck again. I do not know, when exactly did it stop to sync, so I am lost with two different databases of contacts, one on my phone and one on my outlook.com account.

So, if you “fix” it like you did in my last case (delete my phone’s contacts and resync with outlook.com database), I will lose all the changes that I have made on my phone. I would really prefer you to try to fix the problem at the root (whatever it is) and re-sync my databases both ways, so I can keep everything…

Thank you for your help… again.

My agony continues. My Sony Xperia T was updated to Android 4.3, so had to re-add my "EAS" account and surprisingly there is the same thing still going on. Initially when the account is added, all contacts sync ok, but later on no changes are synced anymore. Email and calendar is syncing fine as always.

Can pls someone confirm, that this is a problem with "Microsoft custom domain free email services" and EAS on Android so I can finally move to Gmail, or is there any chance to get full contact sync back to work anytime soon???

Did Microsoft just stop reading this? Anyone?

Thanks for the reply JDT.  Yesterday I got a call from our company helpdesk asking me to try removing and re-adding the account again, and now it works.  They did not know why, only that the Exchange Admins had done something and said try again. :( 

I too have years of piled up data, some going as far back as my Palm Pilot, but my Exchange contacts were fine on my phone for years leading up to this, and when I added the account to another phone it worked fine, so I don't think there was anything data related to this.

I have had the same issue on syncing for many weeks, Finally narrowed it down to data.

As I have moved through jobs over the years, I have always had an outlook contact list. I would export from my prior job and import into the new job's system.  One of the older versions of the data had "Category" for contacts that I no longer use, but was populated.

Turns out that having data in that field was my issue. I removed all instances of entries and voila! My entire contacts folder synced as expected.

I did this in bulk by exporting to Excel, editing there, blowing away the contacts in Outlook and re-importing the edited sheet.

MY ISSUE IS SOLVED.

Good luck with your situation!!

JDT

My contacts have started to sync again and I think I have narrowed it down to Contact Binding.

My Android phone (THL W200) has dual SIMs and you can bind contacts to a specific SIM to use as a preference when calling or SMSing.

It seems as soon as I try to bind a contact (single or all), all contact syncing stops and does not return until I delete and add the EAS account again.

Since I have stopped using the binding feature, I have had no problems with adding, modifying or deleting contact entries with 2 way sync between outlook.com and the EAS account setup on my Android.

I can only assume that there is a field that the phone modifies which outlook.com does not understand and hence fails.

Although your problems may not be exactly the same, it would be worth seeing if there are any other fields (photos, specific ringtones, etc) which are altered on the phone and subsequently breaks the syn as outlook.com does not know how to handle this extra information.

This thread has been going for well over a year, the only possible solved cases are ones where Microsoft says "we made adjustments to your account, try again", but most of those seem to fail as well.  I see no responses from Microsoft since last October.  It seems to be a frequent problem that EAS stops syncing, and sometimes refuses to sync at all after removing and re-adding your account, but MS simply starts the frontline script over on each incident and never finds a solution.

I recently began having this same problem, but I cannot wait months or years in hopes of a solution.  Has anyone suffering here found a way to fix this problem, even temporarily, or does anyone have any idea what MS is doing when they say "we made an adjustment"?  It is very painful having no contacts in my phone, dealing only with phone numbers, and not being able to look people up.