Gmail Contacts - Duplicate Contacts, Merge Contacts, Merging Contacts

[Cadill]

Google, please make a way for me to merge one contact into another!

When I send an email to Bob at b...@whatever.com I get one contact
added to Suggested Contacts automatically.
When I later send Bob an email at b...@somethingelse.com, I get another
contact in Suggested Contacts.

Pretty soon I have lots of contacts that are all the same person.

I want to just click one contact, click "Merge into Contact", select
another existing contact and have Gmail merge the first one into the
second. This would be WAY easier than making me delete one contact
and manually pasting the email into another.

And _automatic_ merging / duplicate processing is the single biggest
lacking feature in Google Contacts.

I know one of your developers can write this in less than a week.
Please get her on it!

Thank you!

-C

p.s. Have you noticed that sometimes gmail contacts lets you have
more than one contact with the same email address (such as when you
added the contact by tagging a person in a picture in Picasa), but
most of the time you get an error if you try to have two contacts with
the same email? Lets get consistent, Google. Thanks :)

[Josh Koenig]

> p.s.  Have you noticed that sometimes gmail contacts lets you have
> more than one contact with the same email address (such as when you
> added the contact by tagging a person in a picture in Picasa), but
> most of the time you get an error if you try to have two contacts with
> the same email?  Lets get consistent, Google.  Thanks :)

Indeed, and what's worse, you get this from the "suggested contacts"
as well, which means trying to enhance your contact DB by hand
requires you to copy, delete, edit, and paste.

Given that all the critical fields have multiple entries, the only
question should be naming for the merged contact. Some smart auto-
munging (maybe 80% effective) would work there, as it's easy for the
user to edit/fix the name if it's wrong.

[otherchunk]

I agree. There should be a merge contact feature. I use EssentialPIM
and I can currently update my google contacts via exporting my
EssentialPIM contact database to gmail. Though this creates duplicate
entries for many people and would like it if there was a merge contact
feature.