This page is used to track feature wishes so you don't have to mail them every time ;-)
Display all contact fields in the duplicate window for adding data
Some users request this, since they want to manually add data to the remaining contact. On the other hand, it is important to have a quick overview over the field that contain the important (= the differing) values. So this might be an option/button "Show all fields" / "Show only fields with values" or "Show empty fields (On/Off)".
Ability to save both individual contacts in the duplicate window without merging them
During the address book walkthrough, the user might recognize that both presented contacts of a pair have to be saved, but the user would like to complete/modify the data of one or both.
Ability to delete both presented contacts
If none of the presented contacts is required any longer, e.g. because the more complete variant has been presented before, the user wants to eliminate both.
Store the information that a certain pair is not a duplicate in order to avoid presentation in future runs
If "John A" and "John B" turn out not to be the same person, the add-on might be so clever to memorize that information and save the user clicks in future runs.
Trash can for deleted/modified contacts
As a backup, the add-on should copy each contact to be modified into a save place and also move contacts to be deleted over there instead of actual deletion. This "safe place" could be a new address book. If "find duplicates across address books" should ever be accomplished, this address book of course would have to be ignored.
Display a list of all duplicates instead of processing pair by pair
The aim of this change would be to prevent all duplicates at a time in a list, where users can mass edit details and resolve duplicates, in order to save the time now used for waiting while the add-on is processing. (Half-done. Find duplicate first and ask later).
Hallo,
This thing is great! It would be nice if the detector continued to search for duplicates in the background, while displaying a duplicate. This would subjectively speed up the program.
Hello,
For me the two high priorities features are:
1) Handling more than 1000 contact lists (this is really the use case when you want to clean it up from duplicates) 2) Handling duplicates accross several address books (sorry to repeat it)
Any date?
Thanks, Olivier
Hi, great idea! 1. It would be great to be able to add extra fields while sorting the contacts. I had the case that a contact had 3 email addresses and I wanted to save all. However this was not possible... A right click on the empty space could provide that. 2. A delete both contacts button could be helpful. I found several old ones 3. If a entry has the same email address but in one the name filled in, I would prefer to keep this, however often the one with empty name and only email address was default
4. A completely other idea: eliminating orphaned entries which are old or used only once. a)Compare with my emails if there are contacts whom I only wrote onece b)Compare if I wrote the last email more than 1/2/5 years ago to this contact Thanks, such a great idea and so helpful tool! Sven
Emails are not case sensitive, so the following could be considered equal First.Last@university.org first.last@university.org Thanks Sven
Großes Lob!!!
Wunsch-Liste: 1. Button "Lösche beider Varianten"
2. Anzeigename, Vorname und Name immer sichtbar für Korrekturen
3. Schaltbar, Automatisch übernahme von gleichen Einträgen. Vorzug hat der Eintrag mit gefüllten Vor- und Nachname gegenüber leeren Einträgen. save automatically contact with filled first & sirname, delete the empty versions.
+1 for "Continue to search in background +1 for delete both presented contacts +1 for Store the information that a certain pair is not a duplicate +1 for an option/button "Show all fields" / "Show only fields with values" or "Show empty fields (On/Off)".
Please consider adding the ability to toggle log recording on or off. This would benefit devs, too.
This is a great extension! Thanks!!
Very useful. Great job! I would suggest the following improvements : - Undo button for last / all (in case I made a mistake...) - Ability to modify some values and keep the contact(s) with new values - When more than 2 contacts are duplicate, it would be nice to see them all and have the option to keep all/several/none. Thanks, Christian
Great AddOn?!
Little improvement: When looking for duplicates the AddOn? currenly takes mailing lists into account. I.e. it finds a duplicate on list 'Family' and contact 'Family Doe', where it shouldn't.
If you do the 'multiple duplicates presented together' enhancement, you should consider building a list which can be processed later - so the add-on could be left to build the 'complete' list of duplicates. Then the user would process by opening a line item and dealing with it. This would be more efficient than the current process-wait loop that the user gets in.
May I suggest a 'copy' button to copy the contents of each displayed field into its counterpart .. to point from the 'red' record towards the 'green' record and to change direction if the record status changes.
Sorry... I didn't see this page and submitted a new issue (#14), instead of posting here...
It would be nice if the add-on could check the address book when adding a new contact. In case of the email be already present in some address book, warn the user about it.
It would cut the bad from the roots and avoid the need of running a process from time to time in order to find duplicates...
1) A way to combine data from two contacts. If the emails are different in the two contacts, I wish to have a button to add the second email (the one to be deleted) to added as additional email to the contact to be saved. 2) >> and << buttons for every field to easily copy the field to the other contact
Automatically merge contacts. If one contact has the a subset of the data of another, then just merge it. This should be case-insensitive, but a capitalised field is considered more correct than a lowercase one.
Also, assume email addresses are case-insensitive.
Prevent duplicates!!
Compare new addresses (especially TB collected addresses) to a deleted list. No more need to repeated checking for duplicates.
HYH
One should be able to edit both entries, all fields, and save changes, not just the fields already filled out, and either save one contact or skip the processing of the pair. Show all fields, and allow editing of both entries, in case two people have the same first name, or you have a married couple entered separately with the same contact info.
It would be nice if I could check the pairs (only) according to the e-mail address and not by first and last name (when a specification follows), e.g. Nico(home) is different from Nico(office) and it should not be considered a duplicate. Thank you in advance. Nico
Great application thanks! I used it on Thunderbird 3 with hardly any problem
Another wish for your list: There should be arrow keys between the fields --> <-- : clicking the arrow would a) Copy the field across from one contact to the other b) Select the target contact as the one to save.
Number 1 wish: Guess contact to save based on number of complete fields. After doing the merge, I am left worried that I might accidentally have saved the less complete contact contact
When comparing duplicates, the last modified field should make the corresponding contact selected as "contact to keep"
First, thank you for the valuable effort!
I agree with Duncan McNutt?, rampagingdaisy, alex.e.c and some others which I would summarize and complete with my feeling, in order of importance:
1. Process all contacts first, then report duplicates in a list and let the user select which contact to edit. I think it is a fundamental aspect to improve contact list management. An example is that you may want to launch a duplicate detection, then immediately take your pizza out of the oven before correcting the duplicates. This is probably the best known example in the world and it will avoid the sequential procedure (wait - skip - wait - do this - wait & see - do that).
To go further, but less important, the progress indicator and the report could be run and refreshed in the same interface. Users like me like to see that kind of thing when eating the first piece of pizza in front of the computer (it also works with any kind of food or activity).
To edit a contact, a toolbar docked on a side of the window would do it very well.
2. In the "Find and Handle duplicates" interface, it would be helpful to have arrows for each field between the 2 columns to move a value from left to right and right to left.
3. An option to auto-merge contacts by setting criterias such as case-sensitive, case correction (on the fly or manually)
Good continuation guys, have nice life!
I need the
Display all contact fields in the duplicate window for adding data
feature. Sometimes I want to move a value to a different field in the other contact before deleting it.
Also It should use the custom icon of TB. There is an external icon in the folder that is "custom" TB window icon.
It reported a duplicate record, but in the window I have totally different people. Same first name only.
Is it possible to add right click action for sync in the status bar icon? I want to force it to sync ..faster.
It would be nice to have a 'Back'/'Undo' button incase you click 'apply' twice/too quickly or need to quickly go back to the last one for whatever reason. I guess this means the app would have to 'store' changes and then only apply them at the end. In the same light you could perhaps have a 'detailed summary page' at the end to show what contacts have been deleted/ammended/kept, etc.. Otherwise thanks for a great, simple but affective app!
A wish about the wish-list itself: It would be helpful to group it by functional area. This should not only help finding things, but also perhaps make it easier to come up with new or alternative ideas.
I have a ton of emails in the collected addresses book. This add-on could compare the entries with this book with all other books and delete the ones on the collected addresses when it finds a duplicate.
wishlist - If duplicates are found with different email addresses automatically show 'alternate email' field
Be able to decide what field should be consider to decide 2 contacts are duplicated. For instance, search for email duplicates, or for name duplicates o whatever.
Secondly be able to search for duplicates between several address books and manage more than 1000 contacts. THANKS
Should look also for duplicate email and phone ... sometimes that is unique.
MERGE - It would be nice if record 1 had phone number but no email and record 2 had email but no phone number if we could merge the records instead of eliminating one and manually editing the other, or possibly have a check box for not storing a BLANK field, so if the records were as above, but record 1 and record 2 had different first names but we said we wanted to keep record 1, we would end up with first name and phone number from record 1 and email from record 2.
An empty field is not a unique match! I have a number of business numbers with no contact name, so the match query presents every combination of contact name? as possible matches.
Also, some way of matching close spellings of the same name would be a useful advantage.
My wish list in order of priority (some of it the same as others mentioned) 1 - Checking across multiple Thunderbird address books (of course) 2 - Ability to show all fields 3 - On-the-fly checking of duplicates (catch them in the cradle). Have a 'Later' button, and a 'Don't ask again' checkbox. 4 - Ability to sync with an external address book in LDIF format, so that you can keep Thunderbird synchronized with your Blackberry/iPhone/Other toy 5 - Plaxo interface 6 - BTW, does the 'Skip' button save modifications made to the two records?
Choose the field with the correct information and merge
I'd like to see colored arrows between fields from the first or second record to choose which one should be overwritten. This should appear like this:
I know it's not exactly what this extension does, but it would be usefull a pop-up warn before adding a new adress when "automatically add outgoing e-mail addresses to my: (some folder)" is cheked, in order to avoid a bunch of anonymous adresses like "info@domain.com" or just to remember to fill the card. Thanks!
Hi, nice feature, An addition would be helpful: delete dead emails that come back with "undelivered" - if you can highlight (mark) the undelivered (returned) emails and with a right click menu could earase all these useless addresses from the address books -
well, this has not strictly anything to do with double entries and could be an entierly new addin or subroutine.
Please add a button to merge the two duplicates! Of course, there is the ability to cut and paste the email address from one entry to the Second Email field in the second, but a "merge" button would be faster and more convenient.
And I'd like to give a strong second to the suggestion of removing duplicates between address books.
Hi, very nice design for the comparison window.
To me, most of the editing (all actually) consists in copy/pasting values, so being able to drag and drop a text field onto another one to move/copy the contents would be awesome. A little like gmail with the labels.
I used copy/paste to move data between a pair of duplicates.. Since the purpose of using the addon is to find/remove duplicates, wouldn't the newly modified (destination of paste) be the one I want to keep? So then in this situation the radio button could automatically select (to keep) for the destination contact.
Simplicity is always better, but I am also a big fan of things being configurable as opposed to hard-wired. It seems reasonable to have the default behavior be selectable- ie: automatic duplicate merging by whichever rule (many mentioned above). However, I am fine with going through my whole contact list, but then again it had relatively few duplicates and my contact list is not extensive.
I notice that it takes about 1 second to check each entry in my address book against the others (about 880 in the book). Seems like the code is likely to be doing a linear match against the entries, and this is slow with larger address books. I'd suggest using an algorithm with better scalability.
i would like to be able to select witch fields to ignore eg: the "notes" field (often has a summery of some fields) and doesn't really matter to duplicates
auto merge > when there are 2 contacts:
contact1: name: dummy1 email: bla@bla.com tel:
contact2: name: dummy1 email: tel: 048569255564
auto merge to: contact3: name:dummy1 email: bla@bla.com tel: 048569255564
else it really liked the program reduced my contacts size from 700 to 300 :p
I just want to be able to merge contacts with the click of a button. If there is a question of which field overwrites which, well then, present it for choice and allow also the option to have both fields (e.g., multiple e-mail addresses).
I happen to know three Kevin Smiths. It gets tiresome to try to maintain those names in my address book without accidentally deleting them.
I have more than 1,500 contacts, and would like to see an improvement to this app so that it can handle more than 1,000 contacts safely. I don't believe that I am having any difficulty, but seeing the warning message has me concerned.
If you're going to add "automatic" options, please make sure that we can turn them off in a config window somehow. I MIGHT NOT want an automatic merge, but there MIGHT also be a time when it is useful.
Warning about mailing list assignment
Often I have duplicates in the address book, where one of them is assigned to a mailing list. So when I try to delete one of them, I would be happy, if there would be a warning, if the item is listed in one of the mailing lists to avoid destruction of the mailing list.
Additionally a flag on each email item in the address book and in your dialogue too, which is listed in a mailing list, would be helpful, ideally showing the name of the list(s) as a tool-tip on mouse hover.
Thanks and happy coding.
Alternatively vote for:
Bug 654744 - Warning about destroying a mailing list while deleting address book entry
I wish for the ability to copy & paste from 1 "duplicate" to another. That way, the "duplicate" that is saved has the best information. In short, the ability to correct "snail mail" addresses and/or phone numbers?
merging is my greatest wish!
I would love to see this work with the current Thunderbird version.....any news on this?
As I needed it urgently, I have just completed a major update that works with current Thunderbird 11 and solves the following items on the above wishlist:
Handling duplicates across several address books Ability to switch the address book after calling "Find and handle duplicates..." The more complete contact should win by default Display a list of all duplicates instead of processing pair by pair
You may download it from http://david.von-oheimb.de/perlen/duplicate_contact_manager-0.9-tb.xpi
More detail on the enhanced version just mentioned may be found at: http://David.von-Oheimb.de/perlen/Duplicate_Contact_Manager.html
Added the changes from DvO777? as version 0.9. Should be accepted by Mozilla reviewer soon.