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
    2016-05-22T18:12:09+00:00

    Thanks for your prompt response. Unfortunately, the link you provided is a general search and the results do not address the issue I'm having. I sincerely wish Microsoft would give serious consideration to the specific circumstances and the specific question. I've spent a great deal of time on this and framed my question narrowly, with the sincere intent of generating a focused response. I've escalated this again to level 2 support in hopes of finding an answer to this problem that is not unique to me and that seems to cut across the silos of community queries.

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-06-27T19:47:37+00:00

    Same issue here.  I never had this problem when I only had my phone connected to my account, so I feel like the different devices that are all linked now (Desktop Windows 10 system, Surface Pro 3, 950XL) are causing the issue.

    It seems like the "people" web portal should be the authoritative entity that forces changes to all other devices.

    Definitely needs fixed.  I don't trust my contacts any more, and it has me thinking about changing my phone for something else.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-08-08T14:22:45+00:00

    I too am having this exact same problem. I've tried everything I can think of, but continue to get a huge volume of duplicated e-mails. I just had a whole batch of them get created over the weekend, when I was completely offline. Microsoft, how can you assist?

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-08-08T14:36:52+00:00

    Perhaps you misspoke, but this issue (thread) is about duplicated contacts, not duplicated emails.

    At least for me, the duplicate contacts issue seems to have resolved itself.

    As best as I've been able to learn, the root cause of the issue was migration errors due to outlook.com migrating to Exchange infrastructure. AFAIK the migration is now substantially complete, so with a bit of luck the duplication won't re-occur. 

    Dave Ings

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  5. 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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