Update: Someone else beat me to it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/53145
As the author of a synchronization extension for Thunderbird 2 and 3, I get a lot of questions about duplicate contacts. Duplicates are more common than ever with the explosive popularity of mobile devices.
There is a fairly popular Duplicate Contact Manager Extension on AMO, but it hasn’t been updated recently, won’t work in Thunderbird 3, and comments mention some bugs, possibly including one that was present in gContactSync 0.2.0a1.
I have not found a way to contact the author, Marian Steinbach, to offer my assistance with updating it for Thunderbird 3. It looks like the Google Group doesn’t have much activity.
I can reuse a good chunk of code from gContactSync which would allow it to work in Thunderbird 2 or 3, but I would most likely package it as a new extension to not force everyone to install gContactSync just to remove duplicate contacts. I had some primitive duplicate detection code in 0.1.x, but it was inefficient and only checked e-mail addresses since that’s what Google used to identify duplicates.
So, I have three questions.
- Would there be enough interest to warrant new duplicate contacts extension?
- Would anyone else like to work with me to develop one? I already have plenty of code for working with contacts and the address book; it would just need an intuitive, customizable front-end and an efficient way to find duplicates. I’m just a bit busy with work, gContactSync, online classes, and a possibly emerging social life.
- Does anyone have a way of contacting the original developer?
7 Comments
Marco Ciampa · June 15, 2009 at 4:15 PM
See this: https://addons.mozilla.org/it/thunderbird/addon/4654
Mort · August 26, 2009 at 8:14 PM
Definitely! There is a real need for a good duplicate contact manager. The limitations/problems with the one you refer to make it unsatisfactory for many users.
Great idea if you have the skills and knowledge!
Mike · October 3, 2009 at 7:06 PM
This would be awesome to see somebody do. The old dup finding has some serious aesthetic issues (and it doesn’t work in TB3)…
jon · November 15, 2009 at 12:32 PM
YES please do this! im DROWNING in duplicate contacts and there seems to be NO help!!! if i could program THIS WOULD BE the FIRST thing i did!!! but i cant : (
so please do it i would happily pay for an addon that really took care of my google/thunderbird contacts, one that cleaned them and then kept them clean in an quick easy and intuative way
Tim · November 30, 2009 at 5:05 PM
I still have not found a duplicate contact manager for TB3 and I REALLY need one — it’s impossible for me to manually do it. I think that as people upgrade to TB3 the demand will exponentially increase. Please make this a priority.
George · January 3, 2010 at 12:54 AM
My Vote is yes
steve e · January 6, 2010 at 12:00 PM
Definitely! I’ve just copied my phone contacts into thunderbird, so now three quarters of the names are email contacts and the other quarter (about 250) are phone numbers with a big overlap of the same people.
It would be VERY Appreciated here !