Duplicate Contacts issue on Outlook.com

Anonymous
2016-03-01T18:24:14+00:00

I am struggling with this issue since I switched from Gmail to Outlook. I exported Gmail contacts to .csv file and imported into Outlook.com account. MS Outlook 2016 (on both PC and Mac) and also on iPhone have no contacts. I wanted to sync all three device with Outlook.com server and get contacts from there. However due to unknown reasons when sync happens, I see that there are up to 9 duplicate contacts on Outlook.com contact list. Sometimes they appear as linked and sometimes separate. 

Initially I though issue is related to Sync with iPhone and MS Outlook 2016. However then I deleted all contacts from Outlook.com account and all devices and also stopped all sort of sync with iPhone, PC and iMac. Now there is no contact on any of device. Then I uploaded .csv file exported from Gmail to outlook.com account. This .csv file have 179 rows with 179 contacts. Here is what happened: I see 50 contacts appeared twice on Outlook.com People account. Rest (179-50) contacts appeared once but there are two linked contacts on each card with once exception which has 3 links. When I click on "Links" on outlook.com account, first link shows "Outlook-(contacts)" and second link shows "Outlook-(My contacts). I checked .csv file and I see last column "Categories" is filled with "My contacts" all the way. 

Next, I clicked Manage-->Clean up contacts to merge those duplicates and to my surprise many contacts are appearing up to 9 times in match list. That means somewhere inside the outlook.com contacts are listed up to 9 times.

It seems problem may be related to Outlook.com as now none of device is syncing back to Outlook.com account.

Then I tried one more thing:

I deleted all contacts from Outlook.com account and added two contact manually to Outlook.com contact list. To my surprise in few minutes, one contact was duplicated automatically. I also observed that even though I have deleted all contacts from Outlook.com (I have 0 contacts now), when I press Manage--->Clean up contacts, it shows hundreds of contacts are still there and there are lots of duplicates suggesting to merge! This is probably the root cause of issue. In spite of deleting everything from Outlook.com contacts, Contacts are retained somewhere on Outlook.com and when I add new contact, they merge and create duplicates.

On Outlook.com People page, I clicked Manage--> Restore deleted contacts. And, it showed that "you have 4539 contacts that can be restored". These are mainly same contacts which are inside .csv file I am trying to import appearing multiple times in deletion log. Is it possible that these deleted contacts residing somewhere inside Outlook.com are syncing back and merging back when I add same contacts via .csv file or manually?

Outlook | Web | Outlook.com | Contacts

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-08-08T16:09:27+00:00

    Thanks, Dave!

    I'm very slowly adding contacts from emails over the past couple of weeks. So far, so good, no duplicates, no old deleted contacts resurrected, AND no crazy linking.

    I'm still using the contacts on my iPhone (backed up to iCloud) as my master file. I'm not sure I'll be comfortable doing any kind of sync across devices for several months until Outlook proves itself stable.

    I'm also waiting for the 10,000+ deleted duplicate contacts at Outlook.com to disappear entirely. This seems to be happening in batches, slowly.

    Dave, thanks for the update and for confirming that the problem stemmed from migration errors. I suspected something like that and was very disappointed in MS tech support reps for not admitting to it (or management for not letting tech reps 'fess up). In my case, MS had migrated me to Exchange (tech reps were surprised that I was on Exchange already but that was the automatic setup for my email), probably before that phase of migration was completely functional.

    In case MSFT is listening, I spent about 15-20 hours with tech support to no avail earlier this spring, not including the time I spent troubleshooting it myself over 3 months. If I wasn't the only one affected, this must have cost MSFT a lot of money when they wouldn't admit to the problem.

    I'd really love for the Contacts/People sync to work the way it is supposed to and hope that it is stable now for everyone who has experienced the nightmare.

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-03-16T02:36:08+00:00

    Has anyone reading this tried phoning Microsoft support to open a formal defect report? 

    At this point (my outlook.com contacts just got duplicated once again) I don't think there is anything else I can try or do to make this problem go away ... someone in MS's cloud is going to have to figure out what's wrong.

    So if no one else has tried phoning, when I get some time I will do it.

    Dave Ings

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-03-07T15:50:22+00:00

    Yes. That's exactly same happens for me as well. 

    Another funny thing is once I delete all contacts from Outlook.com (I have 0 contacts on server) and then go Manage--Clean up contacts.  Outlook.com will show hundreds of contacts that are matching and can be merged. I don't understand if I have ZERO contacts, from where this hundreds of contacts are showing matches and suggesting to merge????

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-03-07T04:11:07+00:00

    Too funny.

    Three days ago I deleted all of my ~400 contacts, waited a couple of hours, and then recreated (reimported) all of them.  This worked fine until this evening, when I checked and suddenly I had over 1,000 contacts - most had been duplicated, and many had been triplicated. The new ones mostly had the bogus 1601 anniversary and/or birthday date.

    Surely Microsoft can do better than this? It doesn't give me much confidence in their ability to preserve my data.

    Dave Ings

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  5. Anonymous
    2016-03-03T18:36:21+00:00

    Can somebody from Microsoft acknowledge and provide update? At least tell us that this thread has been noticed and provide feedback such as this has been forwarded to relevant team and somebody is working on it or nobody is going to look into this. 

    At least it will give an idea whether we wait and stay with outlook.com or go back to Gmail?

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