So you’re a big Gmail user, right? And of course on your iPhone, you have your Gmail setup as an Exchange (aka Google Sync) account, like any normal person would, right? This gives you push email and access to multiple calendars and even your contacts. I made the switch about a year ago, and haven’t looked back.

Well following the big merge of my offline contacts from OS X’s Address Book and all my contacts in Gmail, I was a bit overwhelmed by the load of contacts on my phone. There were a ton of people that I didn’t really need on there, but there’s really no documentation on how to control what’s synced to your phone. If you have multiple calendars, you go to the Google Sync page on your phone’s web browser, and configure the calendars you want to sync, but there’s nothing like this for your contacts. Even in iTunes/Address Book, I had a special phone group that would get synced to my phone rather than the whole address book. So I started poking around.

As it turns out, Gmail has a sort of hidden way to manage this called “My Contacts”. If you switch to the Contacts view in Gmail in your web browser, you should see “My Contacts” near the top left, as well as any groups you might have. Also note “Other Contacts” at the bottom of the contact groups list.

After a bit of experimenting, I determined that “My Contacts” is what gets sync’d over-the-air (aka OTA) to your phone, and “Other Contacts” correlates to “Global Address List”. I went through “My Contacts” in Gmail, and selected all the unnecessary contacts and removed them from that group.

Now on my phone, I have much more manageable list of contacts, and if I need to look for one that was removed, I can do a search in the “Global Address List” (aka GAL). In fact, just like in Apple Mail & Address Book on the desktop, if you start addressing an email on your iPhone, the first hits will be from your local contacts, followed by the hits from the GAL. Easy peasy!

Update: I did finally find this page, after the fact, which talks about “My Contacts” being the group that gets synced to your phone.