Gmail – When exporting Gmail contacts, the names not showing

I found that if I manually edited at least one field, the contact now syncs.

I found the problem in the import. There were about 3000 contact records. Around contact number 2900 I found there was an email field (that Google had exported) that contained eight (!) email addresses, separated by commas.

When I removed that record, Gmail imported the whole file OK. Before that, the entire file was not processed, even though the other records were OK.

I leave this information here to help any future person who runs into the weird case that Gmail can't read a file that Gmail itself generated.

It is not enough to verify the field names are correct. The data itself may be bad and even Gmail can be the culprit. It was hard, painstaking work to find this particular devil so deep in the file.

Perhaps a Gmail dev will read this & decide to add some sort of feedback to the Import Contacts tool - it's a shame that it currently fails completely silently.