14 DAY TRIAL // Gmail is one of the most popular web mail clients in the world at this point, despite coming relatively late to the game, and for good reason, its developers always stride to make it easier to handle the increasing amount of emails we go through every day. Apart from the sheer volume, managing all the contacts is also becoming a daunting task when the number reaches in the hundreds or even thousands. Luckily, Gmail comes to the rescue again with a tool to merge all of your duplicate contacts with just a few clicks.
“Managing a big address book can be a challenge, so it's no surprise that the top request for Google contacts is a fast, easy way to merge duplicate contacts. You've been able to merge contacts one-by-one for a while, but now we've added a single button that merges all your duplicate contacts at once,” Dominik Marcinski, software engineer at Google wrote.
“To clean up your contact list in one fell swoop, just click the "Find duplicates" button in the contact manager, review the merge suggestions (and uncheck any suggestions you don't want merged), and hit the "Merge" button,” he explained.
If you've been planning to spend a few hours cleaning up your contacts, but you just didn't have the time or the courage to dive in, you'll be glad you waited. It was possible to merge duplicate contacts in Gmail before, but it was a rather labor intensive task as it involved going through the list manually and sorting out the mess. This works for 20 contacts, it may even work for 50, but after that things got scary.
Thankfully, you'll be able to do this in a manner of minutes now and all it takes from the user is a little scrutiny to see if there aren't any mistakes in the list of contacts Gmail suggests are duplicate. This is also a great tool if you planned on syncing your Google contacts with the ones from the various devices Gmail supports like the iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile phones as well as any device which supports the open SyncML protocol.
