Yahoo Mail Gets an Updated Duplicate Contacts Tool

Gmail may be getting more headlines than Yahoo Mail and it's certainly more popular with the hipper crowd but, at the end of the day, Yahoo's webmail client is so far ahead in terms of market share that it doesn't really matter. And even as Yahoo continues to look for its 'inner purpose' by ditching search and focusing on content, Yahoo Mail is still getting the attention it deserves and has been getting a steady stream of updates lately. The latest is the duplicate contact tool which now makes it easier than ever to find and merge different contacts entries for the same person.

"Recently, we introduced a quick and easy way to consolidate all your different contacts lists into your Yahoo! Contacts. Whether you’ve imported the various address books that you’ve accumulated over the years or have a really big contact list, you may now find yourself with a few duplicate entries. If so, no problem, now it’s easier than ever to merge duplicate entries into one," Andrew Molyneux, Yahoo Mail program manager, writes.

Using the tool is simple enough. After opening your Yahoo Contacts, for example by clicking on the 'Contacts' link in the left sidebar in Yahoo Mail, the Contacts tab opens up presenting you with two tools, one enabling you to import contacts from another provider and the other being the Duplicate Contacts tool.

After clicking on the button, the tool will scan your contacts and will try to detect the ones which may be the same person. The tool allows you to merge all duplicate contacts which it deemed "Exact" matches, meaning that the room for error is very little, with just one click.

The ones that it isn't sureof, it labels as similar. Of course, if you want to be absolutely sure that everything is in order, you can go through the duplicates entries manually and just merge the ones you know for sure belong to the same person. Yahoo has had a duplicate contacts detection tool for quite a while, but now it's as easy as it can get to go though the process. Gmail also introduced a very similar tool only a month ago.