Find and delete duplicate Outlook Contacts

I have been fairly busy at work with little or no time to write. I did however manage to write a neat script on Friday which I thought I had to share.

My Nokia decided last week that it felt the need to duplicate all my Outlook contacts after I changed something on the ActiveSync profile. Now, normally this is not a big deal, as you can simply sort the contact items by creation date, and delete the duplicates, that is unless you mess around with them, and recreate them all from scratch. (insert curse word here)

I took one look at this problem and thought that it would be far too easy to just delete them manually. I decided to write a script to do the work for me. I have been playing a lot with the Outlook COM object lately so I already had most of the code to get this done quickly.

The script will collect all your contacts, and do a unique sort on the FullName. It then creates a temp folder under your default contacts folder, and moves the unique contacts (remember sorted by FullName only), to the temp folder.

It then dumps all the duplicates in the default contacts to a CSV and deletes them from the contacts.

At this point I stopped the script, as it made sense to check the CSV and the temp folder, and move your contacts back manually if you are happy with the results.

As usual, be very careful with this one. Automatic deletes always have the potential to end in tears. Make a backup of all your contacts before you start with the script.

I hope this script can help you.

You can download the script from here:

https://github.com/technologicza/clean-contacts.git