If you use an email address regularly and/or extensively, it is quite possible to have several duplicate contacts in the address book of your email account. For example, a single person 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 thousands of contacts in your email address book, many of which might have been imported from other email addresses too, the possibility of having several duplicate contacts cannot be ruled out. Yahoo! Mail has an automated tool (presently in beta stage) to automatically find and merge/combine these duplicate contacts in the address book of your email account. This automatic tool works quite fast and cleans up your duplicate contacts in no time. Of course, you can view and approve as to which duplicate contacts need to be merged or combined and which ones are not actually duplicates.
If you want to know as to how to merge duplicate contacts in your Gmail account, click here. To clean up the duplicate contacts using this automated tool in Yahoo! Mail, proceed as under:
(1) Click the Contacts tab in Yahoo! Mail and then click Fix duplicate entries under the Do more in Your Contacts heading in the right pane (see the following image):
Or alternatively, click Options -> Mail Options in Yahoo! Mail and then in the screen that appears, click Contacts. Now click Clean up duplicates (beta) in the right pane (see the following screen):
(2) Yahoo! Mail will start checking for the duplicate contacts in your address book and you’ll see the following message box:
(3) Once the process of identifying the duplicate contacts is over (and it is really fast), you’ll see the details of all the duplicate contacts in your address book (see the following image for an illustration; in this image I have hidden the names of some real persons to protect their identity):
(4) You can click on any name in the above list of duplicate contacts, and Yahoo! Mail will show you the full details of that particular person with the duplicate email addresses, as shown below:
(5) From the above list showing duplicate contacts for a particular person, you can decide whether to combine or merge these duplicate contacts, and if so, then which duplicates need to be combined. For merging a duplicate contact, leave the Merge this duplicate checkbox checked (i.e., the tick mark should remain there) at the top of a duplicate entry in the left pane of the above screen. However, if you feel that a particular duplicate contact is in fact not a duplicate contact (it may be due to the fact that two different persons may have same name) or that you don’t want to merge or combine a particular duplicate contact entry, then remove the tick mark from the above Merge this duplicate checkbox at the top of that duplicate entry.
(6) Now click on Save and Next button at the bottom of the screen. Yahoo! Mail will do the needful to merge / combine the duplicate contacts or leave them as they are, as per your selected options and will save the contacts. Once this process is over, you’ll see the following screen showing the success of the operation:
(7) Repeat this process in Steps (5) and (6) above for merging duplicate contacts for other persons shown in the list at step (3).
That’s it! The address book of your Yahoo! Mail has now been cleaned up of the duplicate contacts.
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Great info. I hve some 2000 contacts with many duplicates but didnt have time to manually remove duplicates. Good timely help for me.