Linking phone to PC creates duplicate contacts

A few weeks ago, I first noticed and reported that Phone Link was suddenly failing to display the contact pictures associated with my frequent contacts, using the default icon instead. I now suspect this was happening because it was confused by seeing many duplicates of the same contact.

Then it started displaying phone numbers instead of contact names.

I then noticed that the contacts area in the regular Outlook application now showed, under the left pane area called "My Contacts," multiple Contacts sources labeled as contact syncs from my phone created by Phone Link.

I deleted those folders from the Outlook application. I also turned off "sync my phone's contacts" in the Android app for Phone Link.

Viewing my contacts on Outlook.com, however, still shows two different categories created by PhoneLink, each containing some 4,000 contacts (I have fewer than 500 contacts in Outlook or Gmail) with some of them duplicating more than 40 times. I cannot delete the category, and will not manually select 10 at a time to do this on the site. Nor is there a way to export this category of contacts.

Microsoft, you really, really need to address this bug and soon.

The issue began to manifest itself, as others have reported in this thread, as soon as the "Sync contacts" switch in the "Link to Windows" app on Android was turned ON by me. See enclosed first screenshot below. As you can see, I have now turned this switch OFF.

WE NOW NEED A SOLUTION IN OUTLOOK.COM:

• We need a way to delete all of the (thousands) of orphaned Contacts which still remain present in Outlook.com.
• We need to be able to delete either that specific Category of contacts (= "Contacts synced by Link to Windows").
• Or to be able to delete the contacts which are in it all at once, instead of only per groups of 10, which is the maximum now; because that method is completely unworkable.

I have the same issue. Does anyone have a fix yet? This is very annoying. I am only able to merge a few contacts at a time and I have hundreds of duplicates. This is ridiculous! I like the link to the windows app, however, this feature (or bug) is creating a nightmare. I may remove the app from my PC if this doesn't get fixed soon.

SDC

Nothing was mentioned about Outlook until now, only Phone Link and Android which are covered by Windows forum.

If Office is involved then this needs to be posted in the Office forum for your edition of Office here:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/newthread?t...

I hope it helps.

Hello, I'm Greg, here to help you with this.

It could be a bug. Are the duplicates in Windows 11, Android or both? Since it syncs the data between them, it should be in both. So you can merge duplicates in Android and see if it sync's to PC:

https://support.google.com/contacts/answer/7078...

Let me know what happens. If you want to report this as a bug to Microsoft use the Feedback Hub app in Start Menu where developers are tasked to process consumer feedback. They will not even see it here. Microsoft developers DO read feedback from customers that comes in via the Feedback Hub, so that is a great way to share your thoughts on how to better serve you as a customer.

Feel free to ask back any questions. Based on the results you post back, I will have other suggestions if necessary.

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