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BusyContacts: iCloud rejected changes because a tag/group is too large

BusyContacts can map Tags to iCloud Groups when syncing via CardDAV.

If an iCloud group becomes extremely large, iCloud may reject updates to that group.

What you may see​

  • Sync failures or conflicts when tagging many contacts in an iCloud address book.
  • A message similar to:
    • “Tag/Group too large”, or
    • “iCloud rejected changes because this tag is too large to update”, or
    • an iCloud CardDAV error that mentions incoming vCard size.

Why this happens​

iCloud stores Groups as a special group vCard containing a list of member references. iCloud enforces a maximum size for a contact group (Apple documents a 256 KB limit for a contact group card).

When a BusyContacts Tag is mapped to an iCloud Group, adding many members makes the group vCard grow until it exceeds iCloud’s limit. At that point, iCloud rejects the update and the tag/group cannot be updated on the server.

In practice, this can happen when a single tag/group contains tens of thousands of contacts. Depending on the data involved, users often hit the limit somewhere around ~20,000–25,000 members.

Fix: split the tag into smaller tags​

  1. Create one or more new Tags (for example, Customers A–M and Customers N–Z).
  2. Move some contacts out of the original tag and into the new tags.
  3. Let BusyContacts sync again.

Once each tag/group is below iCloud’s group size limit, syncing should resume normally.

Preventing it​

  • Avoid putting extremely large numbers of contacts into a single Tag when syncing with iCloud.
  • If you routinely need very large “group-like” sets, consider using a more scalable sync service (Google, Fastmail, Exchange, or another CardDAV provider).

For more iCloud details, see Using BusyContacts with iCloud.

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