I never actually wrote a followup on my entry about indented names on my iPhone. I got a couple comments about it so I figure its about time for an update…

As Justin mentioned in his comment on my previous post the problem was the “Title” field. To the naked eye that field looked blank on both the iPhone and Address Book - however there must have been some BS character in there. My guess is that Address Book somehow ignored the unrecognized character and the iPhone treated it as a space.

The solution that worked for me was both easy and tedious. I went through each “indented” contact on iPhone one at a time and performed these steps:

1. Go to edit the contact’s name
2. Enter something, anything as the contact’s title (ex: “mr”, “bla” etc… doesn’t matter)
3. Save the contact with this BS title
4. Now go and edit the contact’s name again
5. Delete the BS you entered in step 2
6. Save the contact again
7. Repeat for each contact with an indented name

This solution worked for me. I only had about 20 contacts with this issue so it wasn’t too annoying but I couldn’t see myself doing it for much longer before going crazy. I posted my workaround on the Apple Forums and it looks like someone there has found a different solution which sounds way quicker (essentially: export as vCards, delete contacts, import vCards).

Like Justin said in his comment I also believe this is a probably a result of sync’ing with Plaxo. Thats just my gut feeling and I really have no proof I really should have examined my Address Book data before sync’ing back to my Mac. At least that way I’d have a shot at seeing the bad data and possibly cooking up a script to fix it.

The problem’s never come back though - so I’m happy.