Linking phone to PC creates duplicate contacts

I was in contact numerous times with Microsoft Support and after a while I gave up. I ended up modifying a javascript i found on Stackoverflow which deletes all orphaned contacts from console in Chrome/Edge devtools. It was not straight forward, the tab crashed several times because it ran out of memory, but in the end I was able to delete all ~16 000 orphaned contacts and got the sync working again... (edit, removed script after complains on the forum). Problem is caused by bug in Microsoft product, and should be solved by them. I did not have the patience to wait so I ended up fixing it myself with a script...

Hello again. I had to go to Outlook mail on the web to send an e-mail (I don't trust the built in mail app), and I found on "deleted items" all the duplicate contacts. Went onto "Contacts", and all the "tags" and the contacts were deleted, except the ones that I sideloaded with the csv file, exported from my Google contacts, after my aforementioned solution.

Perhaps what I did was enough, and after a while the server caught up and deleted them. (It could also be that deleting all the contacts while still logged into the Microsoft Exchange account on the phone sent the "sync notice" of no contacts to the server, and it had to take a while - I really don't know).

Update from last post: Unfortunately, as I thought, today the contacts are still present via the outlook.com web interface but are gone from the Outlook local client (synced) - these are definitely now orphaned objects, and the only means of deletion appears to be manually 10 at a time....

We are also left with an orphaned category (Phone name, Contact synced by Link to Windows) which is visible under the contact list, but not under outlook.com categories; this also can't be deleted.

I'm surprised this hasn't been more widely reported as a bigger issue, but to those that are affected (and who have noticed yet, depending on how they filter contacts on their phone), it is no joke having to manually delete 23,000+ entries....

It's not a joke indeed. IF you need your Outlook tidy, then it's something they will have to do (personally for me, I could only select 2 at a time, not 3 or more but I don't pay for office 365 so maybe that's why). If you could do WITHOUT the Outlook stuff, might as well try my first solution. At least it restores the phone to a usable state.

This IS very disappointing. By blissfully using Link to Windows during the last several months, my outlook.com contacts list has grown from around 400 to nearly 15,000, most of them duplicates! And no easy to edit the list.

The best solution I have is to uninstall Link to Windows, clean the mess up, then rely primarily on Google Contacts.

My "solution" was to:

1. Turn off contact sync in Link to Windows on android
2. Turn off the Your Phone app (unlink the phone)
3. Using the Outlook for Microsoft 365 app (comes with paid business version of a subscription to Office 365), adding the outlook.com account to it, letting it sync the contacts and then deleting from that app, in the Contacts-section, deleting all the duplicate contacts (located in a separate folder called Link to Windows) and letting it sync for an hour or so. All the duplicates vanished from the desktop app, but about 8 000 were left in the cloud,
4. The following day, I added my outlook.com account to the Outlook for Microsoft 365 app I have at my office, and again synced, deleted and waited. Now the cloud duplicate contacts were down to about 1 600.
5. Then on the outlook.com website I deleted 10 contacts at a time (a slow and tedious process, where you have to wait 30-60 seconds for the delete-option to become available after selection). It took about 3 hours of my life.

I will never, ever use Link to Windows again, and I from now on I will sync my SMS via the google solution.

It is astonishing that Microsoft quality control has failed so totally, and also unbelievable that you cannot delete more than 10 contacts at a time in the cloud.

That is a great solution. I don't pay for office 365, and I can only select up to 2 contacts, if I select 3 things get greyed out lol. I wonder if it's because I don't pay. It would be really funny.

And I'm very upset, because I needed something "quick" and built in to access my phones picture and stuff. Portal by Pushbullet was compromised in its security and also sent from PC to phone, not the other way. And Send Anywhere was amazing, but had steps that became tedious to do over and over, and also created extra folders in my phone. Windows Link was supposed to fill that gap. I guess we can connect it again, without turning on the option to sync but it's so dumb. Now I have my cloud all messed up.