Managing duplicate contacts in Thunderbird

Ask Fedora
1

What is the best way to deal with duplicate contacts in Thunderbird (v115), whether in the same address book or across several?

Ideally duplicates can be merged without losing information from any of the duplicates.

Is this possible to do other than in a manual way?

2

Like this one?

1 Like
3

Yes, like that, but one that works on recent versions of Thunderbird and isn’t abandoned since half a decade.

Released Oct. 6, 2019 64.5 KiB Works with Thunderbird 68.0 - 73.0

Unfortunately a lot of addon searches are frustrating because many are no longer relevant.

There is also CardBook, but if I understand correctly, it creates a parallel address book and does not work with Thunderbird’s native address book.

4

I thought it might be the case, sorry.
I also found this procedure but I am not sure it would work:

  1. Alternatively, export all contacts to a CSV format file. Load that file into a spreadsheet program and sort by appropriate columns to make identification of duplicates easier. Delete unwanted duplicates, save the file back to CSV format and import that file into Thunderbird. Delete all of the data in the existing Thunderbird address book and copy (drag and drop) the imported data to that book. After this you can delete the now empty imported address book.

Or you could try running the old version of TB to install the above extension, sort contacts and then import them in the current version of TB. Crazy plan, I admit.
https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/releases/73.0b2/linux-x86_64/

5

Not crazy. You stimulated multiple ideas, thanks!

Using an old version of TB to use the addon, and importing/exporting address books, could be one option.

Another could be doing similar exporting/importing of address books from CardBook to the native address book, if IMAP syncing of the contacts doesn’t work.

Another thought, for address books associated with a Gmail account, is that Gmail has contact merging and fixing functionality in Google Contacts, and then IMAP should take care of syncing changes… maybe, I hope.

Then there is the headache of custom/nonstandard fields in address books that don’t show up in others, but at least this thought process has generated some potentially viable approaches. Much appreciated!