Big issues with contacts on macOS - finally solved

[solarkraft]

I thought somebody may be interested in this story.

I struggled a lot to get contact sync working on macOS. My calendars worked fine, SSL was set up.

Setup

It turns out that the protocol really matters. Initially I omitted it because the example in the text field was "example.com", just bare. But with the https:// omitted, the mac wouldn't contact the server at all, always responding "Unable to verify account name or password" (even after sometimes allowing adding the account and then asking for the password again later). This also applies to the advanced mode with SSL explicitly enabled.

Actual sync

WIth that out of the way I could finally see my ... where are my contacts? Nothing would show up at all. There wouldn't be any errors and I could create contacts, but they wouldn't show up in my collection. ... it turns out that they showed up in another contacts collection. Not a huge surprise, since at no point did I have to specify which one to use (Apple Contacts has lists for this, but I don't know whether that's also a CardDAV concept). Maybe it would be good to be able to specify which collection to use via the URL. If you already can, it would be nice to have it documented.
My fix was eventually to delete all contacts collections except for the main one. And - oh look - my contacts would appear.

Maybe this report will help somebody with similar frustrations.
These pitfalls should probably be documented or fixed.

[jhass]

For me the key on 13.4.1 was to include the port in the "Server Address" too, that is make it https://localhost:37358. Checking Wireshark it was ignoring the "Port" field and always tried ports 8843 and 443.