Thunderbird Extension for Duplicate Contact Handling: Beta Testers Needed

2006/04/03

If you use Mozilla Thunderbird as an email client and try to maintain your address book, you might have been annoyed by duplicate entries. Unfortunately, Thunderbird doesn’t prevent creating duplicate contacts at all.

Great news for you: I have just written an extension for Thunderbird that searches the whole address book for possible duplicates and allows users to decide whether or not they really are dupes. The extension will find contact pairs with identical email adresses and matching names. Example: The pair

Peter J. Vörstätten
peter@mail.invalid

and

peter voerstatten
peter.v@othermail.invalid

will be considered a duplicate. The user can then decide how to handle the pair.

Now I need some Beta testers to find out if that extension really works in the Real World ™. When it’s done, I will release it to the public. I only test on Thunderbird 1.5 on Windows, so I’d be glad if any Mac users and users with older Thunderbirds would volunteer.

If you are interested, please leave a comment saying that you want to test. Please fill in your your email address (won’t be shown to the public) and tell me what Thunderbird version and what plattform (operating system + processor, e.g. “Mac OS X on Intel Core Duo”) you use. I will get in touch with you within the next few days.

Update: The extension is available here: http://www.sendung.de/duplicatecontactsmanager-for-thunderbird/. Comments on this page are closed.

31 Comments

Ali on 2006/04/07 at 00:51h GMT:

Hi,

Sounds nice. I can try it on Mandrake Linux 10.2 with Pentium 4 CPU. Will there be an option to change the level of duplicateness? Sometimes you may want to remove contacts that are EXACTLY equal. This happens when you merge different address books and get so many exact duplicates. Because the address book for Thunderbird is kept locally, I have many versions of my address book on my home, office and laptop computer and keeping them syncronized is not easy.

Best
-ali-

Marian Steinbach on 2006/04/07 at 19:41h GMT:

Ali, thanks for your interest. I hope that I can send you a testable version soon.

Currently, it’s not possible to configure the level of “duplicateness”. The approach is rather like this: Find everything that looks remotely like a duplicate, then let the user decide whether it’s a dupe or not.

Address book entries which are exactly equal (i.e. all fields are identical) are removed automatically without user interaction.

(BTW: Got your email info. Thanks!)

Shane Turner on 2006/04/07 at 19:46h GMT:

I’ll give this a shot. Might be interesting to see how it interacts with Plaxo. I’m using Thunderbird 1.5 for Win XP (SP2) on Intel Pentium M.

Brad Wutzke on 2006/04/11 at 06:52h GMT:

Am also willing to try it out as the duplicate TB address book entires are quite a pain.

Israel Baumel on 2006/04/12 at 07:31h GMT:

Hi,
Using TB 1.5 with a thousand of contacts imported from Outlook on WinXP SP2, latest updates. Certainly have duplicates. Will like to try it.
Please advise.
Israel
ibaumel@hotmail.com

Ronald on 2006/04/12 at 08:13h GMT:

This sounds exactly like what I’m looking for! Would love to try this out to clean up things.

Max Stockner on 2006/04/14 at 14:20h GMT:

Hi!
I’m really interested in this TB Extension! I would like to play Bughunter

Greets Max

Jordi on 2006/04/20 at 10:18h GMT:

Hi,

I’m using TB 1.5 for windows 2k. I would like to test it since I have some duplicate entries in my adressbook.

Really good idea.

Jordi

Andreas Lichert on 2006/04/20 at 17:13h GMT:

Hello,
I wonder why nobody has tackled the issue before, but I am willing to assist.
Being just a boring Windoze User with TB 1.5 I can’t provide exotic insights, but I am harnessing synckolab at the moment, so that might be interesting to see!?
Have a good one,

Andreas

Tom Westheimer on 2006/04/20 at 22:24h GMT:

Let me know if I can help test it

Estelle on 2006/04/21 at 08:18h GMT:

Hi, I’m currently trying to clean my TB addressbooks
your extension would be a great help. Is it ok for win98 se ?
greetings estelle

Ben on 2006/04/21 at 17:44h GMT:

Thunderbird 1.5, dual boot Windows XP (SP2) and Ubuntu on a Pentium 4 M. I’m interested in testing for both platforms

–Ben

Frank on 2006/04/24 at 19:02h GMT:

Cool – I’d love to test your extension. I strongly need somerthing like that, as I have several versions of outlook pst files, where I need to upload the contacts into Thunderbird and somehow rid myself of dozens of duplicates.

Marian Steinbach on 2006/04/25 at 07:41h GMT:

Folks,

thanks for your interest in the extension. It seems as if it would meet a demand.

Unfortunately, my time resources have been cut recently, since I switched from freelance work to full-time employee. Plus, I ran into a stupid coding issue.

Anyhow, please remain patient. I will release the extension to you, since the core functionality works (IMHO). Maybe some of you guys are even interested in having a look into the JavaScript/Ecmascript code that I’m currently having trouble with.

Marian

GLEMBAY on 2006/04/30 at 12:59h GMT:

Yes,it sound great .I am still suprised that nobody was thinking about such a simple thing,but crucial for the people in daily routine with Thunderbird.

I have THUNDERBIRD V.1.5.0.2. on WIN XP, with INTEL (R) 4CPU 3.066 GHZ

tara on 2006/05/01 at 14:04h GMT:

I would like to try this extension. Please let me know what to do next. I have Thunderbird on windows xp

Chris Hanretty on 2006/05/02 at 19:32h GMT:

I’d like to beta-test this extension. I’m using Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 on Windows XP SP2 w/ an Intel Celeron processor. Hope you’ve still got the time available

Bradford on 2006/05/03 at 22:31h GMT:

I’ve been searchin g for a tool that can do this for some time now. I can beta test on OSX 10.3.9.

Jack Epstein on 2006/05/10 at 01:05h GMT:

Love similar applet Undupe on Palm
Happy to test if needed
TB 1.5.0.2 on Win2k SP4
Intel III

Ernesto on 2006/05/10 at 09:09h GMT:

I would be very interested in testing this out. I’m using Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 on a Windows XP Pro 2002 SP2 machine, using the Litestep shell. I’ve got an Intel Pentium 1.60GHz processor. And about 700 adress book entries! Really looking forward to testing your tool!

DJCarlos on 2006/05/17 at 01:42h GMT:

Hello,hola, bonjour.
i am really interested in trying your extension because i’ve been looking for something like this since the first public release of thunderbird.
i am using th 1.5.02, and i have a lot of extensions installed… maybe useful to see if there is any conflict for example.

my computer: OS – WIN XP PRO SP2
AMD 1800+
256mb

yes i know.. dont laugh at me

i have 3 acounts 1 hotmail – 1 yahoo and the one taht you see in my profile and du to work i receive numerous emails…
so dont hesitate to contact me..
i may be able later to make you a local in french (i’m lining in france know) and spanish (my mother tongue)

see you soon

Trey on 2006/05/17 at 15:29h GMT:

Iâ€™m IT staff in university setting, my users (and myself) would love something like this. Please send me a copy.

I have users on Thunderbird 1.5 in Windows XP SP2 on Intel 4 and 3. One user on Mac OSX 1.4.6 on a G5. And a many users in Red Hat Linux (a custom build) on Intel 4 and 3.

Marian Steinbach on 2006/05/17 at 15:37h GMT:

For those who comment here: It’s there already. Go get it!

http://www.sendung.de/duplicatecontactsmanager-for-thunderbird/

Viv on 2006/05/22 at 00:30h GMT:

i’d like to give this a shot.
found it thru google.

Alin on 2006/05/23 at 14:47h GMT:

mozilla thunderbird v 1.5.0.2 microsoft windows xp sp2, sempron 2500+

Paul on 2006/05/29 at 14:42h GMT:

Great extension. I’m surprised there aren’t more versions.

The biggest issue I have with the extension is I have a large number of contacts without an email address. It would be nice to have an option that lets you skip the contacts with a blank email. Then I can go back and manually process them.

I’m running Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 on Windows XP. I’d be MORE than happy to participate in beta testing your extension.

Paul
USA