How can I delete all the contacts on my cingular 2125?

[ieubts]

Other than one at a time, I can't seem to find a way to delete all contacts on my phone. Please advise if you can. Thanks in advance.

[Mike Temporale]

Are you looking to erase everything on the phone? There should be a little utility that will do this for you in the accessories folder. Otherwise, if it's just contacts, I don't think there is an easy way.

[ieubts]

No, I was hoping to avoid having to erase everything on the phone because then I'd have to set up all email accounts again, etc. I figured there must be a file or something out there I could just delete through file manager. Even if the procedure is complex, I'm willing to give it a go. I'm testing activesync with a couple of large contact lists (+3000) and i hope there is another way to delete contacts other than doing a hard reset on the phone.

[ieubts]

Well, after some searching, I found the file that contains all the contact/calendar/task info is called PIM.vol. However the phone won't allow me to delete it......so if anyone has any advice on how to delete PIM.vol, I'd be greatly appreciative. This is driving me nuts!

[Jerry Raia]

Are your contacts synced with an exchange server? If so you can just delete the server and your contacts will vanish.

[ieubts]

Sorry...you lost me there. Delete the server???

[Jerry Raia]

Yes if you are syncing with an exchange server, delete it from your Active Sync settings and re sync the device. It will wipe out your contacts and calendar etc on the device. If you are just syncing with outlook on your PC it is a different matter and you might delete everything in outlook as well. You need to be specific as to what you want and what you are set up for at the moment.

[jkovacs]

How about backing up your contacts, deleting them from Outlook, syncing with the phone, and then importing your backup back into Outlook?

...Joe K.

[ieubts]

I tried that, but there doesn't seem to be any "one way" sync capability....in other words, after I deleted the contacts in outlook, the sync process repopulated Outlook cause the contacts were still on the phone. This is the root of my problem. All i want to do is delete the contacts on the phone. Any windows mobile gurus out there?

[Mike Temporale]

I tried that, but there doesn't seem to be any "one way" sync capability....in other words, after I deleted the contacts in outlook, the sync process repopulated Outlook cause the contacts were still on the phone.

disable the contacts sync in ActiveSync first. ;)

I would just delete the ActiveSync partnership and then start fresh. Just tell it to replace the information on the phone with what's on the computer and tell it not to sync contacts.

[ieubts]

I believe I've done that but I want to make sure. I deleted the partnership a couple of times....unchecked contact sync (also tried checking it)....and specified that if there were conflicts, desktop overwrites. No joy so far with that. The only option I'm seeing in version 4.2 (activesync) is "if there is a conflict....replace item on device". The fact that the contact exists on the phone (and not in Outlook) doesn't appear to be viewed as a "conflict".... so the sync loads the phone contact back into outlook.

[ieubts]

Trial and error finally paid off.

To delete all contacts, appts, tasks...on the 2125....

-Rename the PIM.vol file to something else (junk, garbage or whatever). Interesting that you can't delete it, but you can rename it.

-disconnect the phone from the PC

-reboot the phone. This creates a new (emty) PIM.vol. Now you can resume syncronizing from scratch.

If you want to keep the data in the PIM.vol file, you can copy it to your storage card...or anywhere else, and then bring it back and restore (after you rename it back to PIM.vol).

[aximilation]

I would say that if you were to download the pim.vol file and open it in a text editor (hoping you can) you could delete contacts from it by taking a bunch of lines out and then save and upload. Where is this file located?

[ieubts]

The PIM.vol file is in the root directory of the phone....along with the email file and about 6 others. They have a red icon. I tried to open PIM.vol with notepad or word, but microsoft said it was an unsupported file type. I bet if I renamed it to a .txt file it might work, but things are working pretty well right now and I don't want to risk screwing up the sync. Thanks for the idea.