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  • Need help with Contacts syncing and De-Googling/Proton Mail

1e2j6 for contacts, what I do after I used to get them from Google contact sync when I was newer on GrapheneOS, was of course give Google Play Services the contacts permission, go to setup and restore in Google Settings under Apps, and then restore my contacts. Then remove contacts permission from GPS.

Then I started exporting the .vcf contacts file from settings in the Contacts app, and then importing it again right away. That way it populated the "device" contacts section in the Contacts app! When you get them from Google, they are all marked as "Google contacts" and not "local device contacts."

If you export then import them like this, and get them saved as "device contacts, Seedvault will back them up for you to USB backup when you do an app backup, along with SMS, MMS, System Settings, and Call Logs.

Proton Mail is supposed to have a Contacts function. I've been meaning to try it, since even though its an older feature and I've had Proton Mail since it was announced I've never heard if it until last week! I just searched and found this very helpful article that shows how to take that very same .vcf file that you get when you export the Google Contacts while making them " device contacts" and you can use that to import them all into Proton Contacts (part of Proton Mail) and store them encrypted!

Hope this helps!

      Proton does not offer contact syncing yet, My method is to sign up with a Nextcloud provider and I sync using DAVx5, get it through Fdroid or pay for it in Google play, and sync with Thunderbird and use the proton bridge until Proton does real time syncing

        My contacts are maintained through Fastmail, as they are my main email provider that I use with my custom domain. I then sync Fastmail's CardDAV using DAVx5.

        This way, changes I make on Fastmail through my computer gets synced to my phone, and changes I make on my phone gets synced back to Fastmail.

        An alternative is to offload your contacts to a Nextcloud instance and then Nextcloud's CardDAV using DAVx5.

        EDIT TO MY LAST POST ABOVE:

        Proton Contacts in Proton Mail does not accept the .vcf file produced when exporting from the GrapheneOS Contacts app! It errors with the message:

        "Protonpass does not (currently) support .vcf files <v3.0"

          Kevin719 I will second Kevin's approach. In fact, I - a very NON-tech person - installed my own Nextcloud sever, set it up so I can reach it over the internet, and then I sync contacts via that; and calendar events and appointments, and music lists, and RSS feeds, and browser bookmarks, and songs,and movies, and photos; and it acts as my own "Dropbox", and it acts as my own "Zoom" like video calling tool..... Not only is this very convenient, but all this data is on MY devices only.

          (When friends dispose of their old computers because they want to upgrade, I take them off their hands (for free), so I had a computer ready to use to run Nextcloud at my home.)

              dln949 How do you securely connect to your Nextcloud server from your phone outside of your network? Do you use a VPN? My understanding is that it is very insecure to run things without a VPN?

                  dln949 YES! I just came into an older computer too! Its from 2017 or 2018, only has a 240GB SATA SSD, small & slow compared to most NVME, but I'll over time build up the number if WD Red, Seagate IronWolf or other NAS drives, until I have 4 or 5 in RAID5. I was originally thinking 8TB, but the 12TB ones are the "pro" line, so maybe...

                  4X 8TB is already 32TB, at 12 it would be 48TB! Considering I have 13TB in (mostly external) NVME storage for my X1 Extreme G4, and regularly find it all full, I can't wait!

                  Personal servers are the BEST, aren't they?

                      Tryptamine That was actually very helpful. For some unknown reason, Proton Mail only has that Contacts icon in the sidebar, which I hid a very long time ago and forgot existed, so I thought there was no interface to add or edit contacts. Very bad UX design, in my opinion. I will explore this option further, as well as evaluate other people's suggestions, thanks!

                          1e2j6 You are most welcome! I just found out about it last week, I thought "Proton must, have something for contacts," so I searched Startpage for "Proton Contacts" and lo and behold...

                          Proton Contacts!

                            1e2j6 Yes, I always use a VPN. Also - I am careful not to put anything "important" on my Nextcloud server. A person could argue that my contacts list on the server could expose information about my contacts if a bad guy did get into the Nextcloud server. But I only put down information about each contact that can already readily be found on places like Whitepages. And - among my contacts, I'm the only one who cares about privacy, I know these people, I love them, but I know how careless they are, I'm certain they already handed over all their contact info to Facebook or Tik Tok or wherever.

                              Tryptamine Yes, I very much like having my own Nextcloud server.

                              Having said that, I repeat, I am not a tech person, I just followed some simple instructions for installing Nextcloud and how to maintain it, very easy. Maybe a network admin would faint dead if he came to my house, but I think I did everything correctly. I also used another old computer to set up within my LAN a simplistic media server using Jellyfin and mStream, and used yet another old computer I got for free as a Kodi box.

                              On the other hand, unlike Kip from "Naptoleon Dynamite", I do not love technology, my feeling is that I want to spend as little time fussing over it as possible, I just want it to work and be my slave to make my life easier. Consequently, I've never been able to justify running my own email server, it seemed to me it would consume too many evenings out of my week. I'm on the fence about setting up my own xmpp server, not sure yet......

                              P.S.: I think it'd be very interesting to have a convo with you IRL about how you settled on your user name.

                                dln949 hey, thanks for that! Saves me searching Startpage later!

                                I do love tweaking and messing with technology, that's why I'm having loads of fun modifying and rebuilding GrapheneOS over and over. I'm really not the best at coding, used to be a lot better, in elementary school of all times if you can believe it! Won 2nd place at regional computer programming competition back then, before computer games ate up the next 12 years of my life, and kids most of the rest...

                                Once you set some stuff up, servers should work for you, not be work so much to maintain. There will certainly be security and software updates, that's essential for any healthy system, but that and it will be good! I need to be able to remote into it using RDP or SSH, since I need it for torrent downloading and seeding, hence the RAID5 array (random array of independent disks). 3+ drives for RAID5, the size equivalency of one is used not for storage, but for "parity," error correcting code that can be used to rebuild the entirety of the data on one disk if it fails for any reason! Reads from the array are also 3-4X faster, depending on the # of disks.

                                I don't think I'll do email either. Proton is too awesome! Torrents, media server, and it came with a huge Geforce RTX 1080, older card but its massive! I'll use its CUDA cores to help trascode my many lossless audio files from 44.4khz to 384khz or 768khz! May, and its a very big may, improve sound quality and reduce subtle artifacts. That's at least what everyone on r/audiophile claims!

                                Yeah, search my username on a privacy-respecting search engine, and you'll get the gist of why I chose it! Sacred medicine, and I'll say no more! My other online nickname is "Phenethylamine," much less common. If you ever see that anywhere its probably me!

                                  dln949 oh yeah, make sure you install a firewall on your server, something like Uncomplicated Firewall. Easy as this:

                                  sudo apt install ufw gufw

                                  gufw is a graphical front end. Deny all incoming, and add exemptions for any programs you have that need it. That way your systems aren't wide open!

                                      I got an old mini PC flashed StartOS, inatalled nextcloud, installed Davx5 on my pixel, contacts, photos and notes now sync.

                                      StartOS has an easy guide.

                                      10 months later

                                      kallekruse Does Decsync CC still work for you? For me it did, but since a few months it looks like it doesn't anymore...