How to merge or clean up duplicate contacts in Gmail

[See, latest Update at the end of this article.] You’re likely to have several duplicate contacts in the address book of your email account if you use this account regularly and/or extensively.  For example, a single person in your contacts list may have two or three or even more different email addresses and may have been listed as different contacts in your email account with each email address shown as a different contact entry in your address book. If you have hundreds or may be thousands of contacts in your email address book, many of which might have been imported from other email accounts too, the possibility of having several duplicate contacts cannot be ruled out. Gmail provides you a semi-automatic way to merge or clean up your duplicate contacts in your Gmail account as per which you’ve to find out manually which duplicate contact entries correspond to a single person and then Gmail can merge them automatically. Thus, merging of duplicates is not fully automatic in Gmail. As I have explained in an earlier article, How to merge or clean up duplicate contacts in Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Mail now provides a fully automatic method to find all duplicate contacts for all persons for whom such duplicates contacts exist and then to automatically merge them with your approval. At this juncture, Gmail does not support a similar fully-automatic method to merge duplicate contacts in your Gmail account.

Before, I proceed further, let me point out that “duplicate contacts” means that for the same person there are two or more entries in your contacts list. This may be due to a person having different email addresses due to which he finds mention in separate contacts entries. Sometimes, it may so happen that the name of the same person in the contacts list is shown slightly differently in two different contacts. For example, a person may be mentioned as “John Ducan” in one contacts entry and he might be shown as “John M. Ducan” in another such entry. You can merge such contacts into one to elimination duplication. On the other hand, it is also possible that two genuinely different persons may have exactly the same name; ensure that you don’t merge their contacts by mistake!

In this article, I’m explaining the method to eliminate the duplicate contacts in Gmail and to merge them into a single contact. To do so, proceed as under:

• Login to your Gmail account. Click Contacts link in the side-bar on the left (see image below):

• In the next screen that appears, click All Contacts (see image):

• The list of all your contacts is now displayed on the screen in the alphabetic order. Find out manually which are the duplicate contacts for the same person listed in your contacts list. Put check marks in front of the names of (only) those contacts which you want to merge into one. See the following figure wherein I have put check marks in front of 3 duplicate contacts of the same person “John Ducan”:

• Once you put the check marks in front of more than one contacts, you’ll notice a “merge” link in the next column. For example, in the image shown above, since I had selected 3 duplicate contacts, the next column shows “Merge these 3 contacts” link. Click this link.
• Now, on the next screen, you’ll see the full details of these 3 contacts. Confirm whether all these duplicate contacts actually belong to the same person. If you want to exclude a particular contact from being merged, then click on the “remove” link in front of his Email (see figure below). After confirming in this manner, click Save button at the top.

• Gmail will now merge these contacts into one contact entry by eliminating the duplicates, and the next screen will show the merged entry. In the example cited above, I got the following screen wherein the above three contacts for “John Ducan” were merged into one contact, with all the three email addresses now listed under the same single contact:

That’s it! Repeat the same procedure for merging duplicate contacts of other persons also.

It is pertinent to point out that in spite of being merged into a single contact, all the email addresses of that person will still be shown under the contact name and any of these email addresses can still be accessed while sending email to that person.

Before I end, let me point out that “John Ducan” and his 3 email addresses shown in this article are fictitious and have been used only for the purpose of demonstration for this article. To generate fake names like this, for genuine purposes in good faith, see my earlier article Fake name generation website for anonymous browsing.

Update (December 16, 2009): Now, Gmail has also introduced an automatic method to merge duplicate contacts, read this article for more details.

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