Contact keeps re-appearing despite deleting, multiple copies!

Same problem for me.  Started just before MS told me they migrated my account.  Followed their advice in the email they sent.  One old contact keeps reappearing hundreds of times.  I have spent hours and tried everything to stop it.  Removed all devices.  Turned off sync.  Reloaded accounts.  Searched the web for a solution.  I have checked every setting possible.  This is a problem MS generated with the Migration, it is for one old contact I have not used for years, I believe I delete along time ago.  This is driving me crazy.  The sync between outlook and Skype is another problem.  Maybe my outlook is haunted.

I will give MS a few more days and then switch to Gmail. This is not tolerable. It's filling up my address book, and I cannot spend my day deleting contacts.

I have left Windows Phone for Android not long ago, so I am really this close to leave Outlook as well.

Not to mention the whole Skype contacts integration, which is really a joke.

Cheers

maTTeo

Hi maTTeo,

I agree it's annoying, my approach has been to leave the browser open and a few times a day I'll delete the new contacts so it doesn't get out of hand.  I had 39 from over night that needed removing this morning.  I do notice that the rate of contact duplication is variable, some times I see perhaps 1 new duplication within an hour, other times it could up to 10.

I think it's worth waiting for a fix rather than selling your soul to gmail!

Cheers, Hube

It might not be related, but...

Today ALL my skype contacts appeared in the "skype contacts" list in people.live.com. I used to have only some of them. It might be that the contact sync between skype and people.live.com is only done ~2 weeks or so, or it might be that they are actually playing around with this. Let's hope for the latter.

I also noted that from today, switching from mail to people is instantaneous: instead, before it used to load, for a couple of seconds, the old orange interface, for then loading the new one.

Cheers

maTTeo

I'm quite certain the problem with reappearing contacts and thus doubles in the context of synchronization is NOT caused by the recent migration, as I've experienced it already in 2014, when I got my Windows Phone.

(It is imaginable though that the problem is rooted in the old live.com system while the new system isn't entirely detached from that.)

My suspicion is that the reappearing is caused by imperfect synchronization. When you add a contact entry to one database (say - MS Outlook) then the synchronization function creates a similar entry in the other database (say - outlook.com). This new entry is supposed to be identical, but it is not. Mostly the difference is invisible to the naked eye, but sometimes you can see it. I've seen cases where the font of the notes attached to a contact entry was changed.

Now, when you run synchronization again, it sees two contact entries in both databases, which are very similar, but not identical. Therefore another entry is created, at least in outlook.com. These different entries are sufficiently similar though to get "linked" automatically, so you don't see any of this on the Windows Phone (unless you specifically look at the links).

This shows the fundamental flaw of synchronizing via the cloud: with so many different devices linked to the same account, if only one of them synchronizes less than perfectly, the whole thing blows up.

Unfortunately this does not explain why my Windows Phone does not sync contacts and calendars anymore (no problem with mail though), producing error code 80C805E2. I can only speculate that this is related to the design of the synchronization process, which is incredibly slow. The original synchronization of 5k contacts (30 MB of data) into my (empty) phone took no less than two whole weeks!