Guest post by Kent E. Soulé, San Francisco, California

It used to be possible to import GMail contacts into Skype (actually, Skype would search my GMail contacts, and identify the ones with Skype accounts).  Very helpful ... particularly when I have over 900 GMail contacts.

In November or December 2007, this feature ceased to be functional (though you wouldn't know it from the Skype website).  Instead, when I now try to import contacts from GMail, I receive a message that "Skype could not find any contacts from your address books" ... and offering to "Click here to add people to your contact list manually" .... riiiight!!  See the attached image.

The loss of functionality appeared to occur coincident with the late 2007 GMail interface upgrade (which I don't use) ... though the two aren't necessarily related.

I wrote Skype tech support, and received the advice to remove and reinstall Skype.  Sure. What I didn't tell them is that I am experiencing this behavior on three different machines: two that are XP (one of which is at the office, and maintained by the IT Department) and 1 that is Vista. 

Hard to believe that "reinstall Skype" is the solution (it wasn't). I've searched the Skype forums, and others have experienced the same problem (the nasty workaround is to export your contacts from GMail to Outlook, and then do an import from there).

Each time there is a new version of Skype, I keep hoping that the problem will be fixed.  Nope.