Linking phone to PC creates duplicate contacts

My same experience. Spent 6 hours with 3 technicians at Microsoft and Outlook. The first one's fix made it worse.

Long story short. The contacts must be romed at the main Outlook servers. If not deleted there, then even if you manually delete them all on your device ... it populates there.

This is a global issue and the Outlook people at Microsoft know it.

I fear that this is all far more complcated and confused that just "Link to Windows" or whatever Micorosft has now called it in one of their usual bids to confuse everybody.

As with others writing here, I have:

1. thousands of duplicate contacts that something has created
2. within those contacts, lines and lines of duplicated data such as numbers and notes
3. The Outlook Android App which, when contact sync with @msn.com is turned on, slows to a crawl . To the extent that it is virtually unusable. A restart/re-sync does not solve the problem
4. A folder in Desktop Outlook which references my Samsung s23U but shows no contact data in it
5. A folder in Outlook.com web which also references my Samsung s23U but has loads of duplicated contacts in it
6. Contacts in the Outlook Android app which cannot be searched - there is no search function
7. Contacts in the Outlook Android app which cannot be edited in the OL app - you are referred to the Samsung Contacts app
8. Despite the mutiplicity of contacts the merge function in the Samsung Contacts app does not find them
9. Confusion as to whether sync of my @msn.com account, which is personal, should be through Exchange or Hotmail/Outlook. Or both
10. Confusion as to whether the Samsung account should also be synced or whether that would create yet another issue
11. Outrageously, no tool within Outlook desktop or web that will clean up duplicate contacts. I now have nearly 20k of them created by this mess.

Nothing written below is a clean, easy and clear solution. That should come from Miscrosoft. Perhaps working with Samsung as the programs are linked. Phone Link is a great app but if it is messing up contacts then it is undermining itself.

It looks like the latest version of the Link to Windows tool no longer has the sync contacts option.

MS have acknowledged the duplicate contact issue and posted this in the 365 Service Status:

Title: Users' contact lists are being unexpectedly duplicated

User impact: Users' contact lists are being unexpectedly duplicated.

More info: This issue will only impact users who sync their personal account device contacts with Microsoft Teams.

To remove the duplicate contacts created by this issue prior to the completion of our long-term clean-up process, affected users can use the workaround described here: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook\_com/forum/all/workaround-for-outlookcom-users-experiencing/d58d75c2-76a9-4176-b907-333ddfa44952

We'd like to get your feedback on the workaround we provided. From a non-mobile device, please rate this post and submit it in the textbox.

Current status: We're continuing our efforts on a long term solution to clean up the remaining duplicate contacts which will be available closer to the end of June. In the interim, affected users can follow the steps provided in the linked article to manually remove the duplicate contacts.

Next update by: Friday, May 26, 2023, at 6:00 AM UTC

Paul, really appreciate the work you have done on this. Did you get some kind of ticket number from the Microsoft support staff that I could give them when I contact them.

Cheers..............Neil

You're welcome! There was a ticket number indeed, but that only identifies the individual case session with me, it is not universal.

Follow these steps to open a chat session with Microsoft customer support:

1. Open Outlook.com
2. Click on the Help menu item.
3. Click on the ?-icon.
4. In the Search field, type "duplicate contacts" and press enter.
5. At the bottom, below "Still need help?", click on the "Yes" button.
6. Choose a support option: "Chat with a support agent".
7. Write a brief description of the problem (max 80 characters).
8. Enter your email.
9. add an attachment: I did so: I created a pdf file with a description of the problem and two screenshots.
10. Click on the Confirm button.

You will then be connected to a chat session with Microsoft Support. Make sure you ask them to read your pdf file as part of your first answer to them.

I just contacted support in the same way as described and here's what they had me do.

1. Log into Outlook.com and go to the Settings area (gear at top-right)
2. Click the Mobile Devices part of settings. In my case there were more than 40 entries for "Outlook" and another 20 or so that said "OutlookUniversal." There4 was also one labeled "ChatService."
3. Delete each one individually from that list. Note that when you hover on one and click the delete icon your choices are "SAVE" and DISCARD" click SAVE, even though you might think to click DISCARD. (bat bit of UI coding there!)

That took several minutes of clicking/waiting, but when I was through I had 390 contacts in the category called "OnePlus6TSingle" where before I had nearly 4,000. The tech told me to wait for about 12 hours and they should all be gone.