[SUGGESTION] New MPE feature to manage duplicate contacts

[trids]

There appears to be an elusive problem, one which is not confined to MPE, where contacts are duplicated when syncing between Android and Outlook. So this.

It highlights the need then for a tool to help users identify and resolve duplicates when they occur. And if this tool could be included as part of MPE, then it would be a further draw card for new users, as well as satisfying the needs of current victims of the duplication bug.

So may i boldly suggest an interface that provides for the following:

1. Allows the user to specify the criteria that identify a duplicate .. a composite key formed by any combination of fields that might match two or more contacts.
2. Sorts the resulting contacts on these fields, and removes unique contacts from the display, so that only the potential duplicates are considered.
3. Provides a way for the user to merge the duplicates by easily inspecting and copying across any non-key field(s) before he discards the duplicate contact item(s).

[Kathy]

Agree, a feature to manage and merge duplicate contacts would be useful.

(As well, in MPE, for the Contacts it would be helpful if there were different icons beside phone contacts, Facebook contacts, Twitter contacts and LinkedIn contacts. I'm still trying to figure out how the link between the multiple contacts for the same person works.)

[trids]

Thanks Kathy .. just to be clear though, my proposal is about eliminating duplicates, manually, with help from this enhancement, with the ultimate aim of deleting redundant contact items.

As such, it doesn't have anything to do with the "merge" feature that is available from the Android Contacts app. Which is more of a "virtual consolidation" rather than an actual merge. It seems to create a consolidated virtual contact that contains all the values of the linked contacts, and then suppresses the real linked contacts... until edit time. It has its place i guess, in helping to resolve overlaps across various contact sources (eg Phone v Facebook v Twitter etc)

But the Android merge is not the proper tool to resolve duplicates that occur WITHIN a given contact source. And this is where i'm hoping FJ can fill the gap.

[FJ]

There was already a merge-feature implemented in MPE but i had to disable it for Android based phones cause the users did often misunderstood the sense of this feature. Since the phone does show contacts merged and MyPhoneExplorer keeps them splitted they thought its good to join them all. As a result they got a bad Facebook-Contact account cause many deleted Facebook contacts, or others which did join them all to one Facebook-Contact with several private infos which is also not good.

Caus eduplicate searches: The problem is that a duplicate is mostly not exactly equal, this makes it hard to compare with good logic.