Windows mail app not pulling down gmail contacts

Question

I've linked my gmail account to my Surface. I can use the mail app fine, however one very annoying thing is that the mail app doesn't appear to list all of my gmail contacts despite me telling it to sync contacts. If I try to write an email to someone I have about 10 contacts available locally with email addresses -- despite having hundreds in gmail. I think these are likely from other sources (ie facebook). I see lots of people in my People account, but I don't see any email information on them. When I click "manage" I get brought to the gmail account.

I've seen very non-user friendly work-arounds here. But this seems like a giant hack and doesn't allow direct management of my contacts.

My Windows Phone does this fine, so I suspect that maybe this is something that should work...

EDIT

The few contacts I have from gmail only have phone numbers. One or two have email addresses. Could these be just the contacts Ive added with my windows phone?

Answer 1

Whats really being looked for is an ability to search the server and then locally cache autocomplete email addresses. Gmail's web app and Windows Phone's mail app does this. Windows Mail in Windows 8 does not.

As for why not all contacts are being downloaded, it appears that windows is downloading all contacts under "My Contacts" in gmail. "Other Contacts" -- containing all the automatically stored contacts does not get synced.

One work around is to go into "Other Contacts" in gmail and import contacts into "My Contacts".