Duplicate Contact Manager for Thunderbird: New Release for Thunderbird 2

2007/04/20

Thunderbird 2 is in the makings and some early adopters have asked me for an updated version of Duplicate Contact Manager add-on.

Here it is. Please go to the add-on page

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

in order to download. The addons page at addons.mozilla.org is currently awaiting the update, too.

I’m pleased to tell that the add-on has quite found it’s place amongst Thunderbird users. One thousand downloads per week aren’t bad. Especially those who synchronise their contacts with other tools such as PDA, phone, web services etc. obviously have tremendous trouble with duplicate contacts.

In the meantime, some skilled developers have started sending in code, wanting to help with thefurther development. I will try to make this a sourceforge project soon, so there will be a channel for gathering of requirements, source control etc.

Focus for the next version should be:

Search between different address books
Performance of search algorithm and scalability beyond 1000 contacts
Localization

17 Comments

Ron Killmer on 2007/04/23 at 04:15h GMT:

While running a Dup check It kept listing every family member as a dupe of my father. Looks like only the family name is used by Dupe check without the given name being used as secondary filter.

Other wise the extension worked very well, Thank You.

Ed Taubman on 2007/04/23 at 07:20h GMT:

I cannot get contact duplicate to install. I get a message that it is not compatible with Firefox????

Marian Steinbach on 2007/04/23 at 08:08h GMT:

Hi Ed!

Since the add-on is for Thunderbird, you cannot install it in Firefox.

However, Firefox might try to install it right away after doenloading. In order to prevent this, right-click the download link and chose the option “Save target as…” to save the file locally.

Marian

Pontus Berg on 2007/04/23 at 23:10h GMT:

I get error running the extension (under Thunderbird 2). Is there a potential launguage thing? Please check a reference to the actual errorcode

http://www.berg.to/dupe.png

/Pontus
PS: Hope this is not treated as spam while I like to a picture – it is NOT!

Marian Steinbach on 2007/04/24 at 06:57h GMT:

@Pontus: thanks for the bug report.

I don’t know what could have caused the exception. Have you modified your address book in the background after starting the duplicate removal dialog? What exactly happened before you got the error? Can you reproduce the error? What system are you using?

Marian

Christoph Steinbeck on 2007/07/05 at 10:03h GMT:

Marian,

1. somewhere else you request a screenshot if we get an exception with DCM. I cannot publish my screenshot as Pontus did, so is there an email for bug reports?
2. I can run DCM multiples times over a new adress book (~500 contacts) and it finds duplicates again and again until it finally found all (different ones, that is).

Cheers,

Chris

Bud on 2007/07/13 at 00:20h GMT:

Overall your little application is working great. However, I am getting some sort of null pointer error:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v359/wwbach/ScreenHunter_1.jpg

Pontus Berg on 2007/07/27 at 21:08h GMT:

Howdy!

I did not modify my addressbook in the bckground.

I run XP (Swedish), Thunderbird 2. I do have a few plug-ins, but the only related I can think of is Plaxo.

/Pontus

mike on 2007/08/12 at 03:22h GMT:

can you make it so that this can be used with icedove (its just a renamed version of thunderbird what ever version) Its a debian linux thing .. Since I use debian Linux you can google the thunderbird thing with debian .. othere then that can you make it so debian linux users can use your add in for removing duplicates (I got alot )

Alot of debian users not to mention debian based linux distrbutions would love you for it! I am not alone.

Hey thanks in advance feel free to reach me at my email

Nick on 2007/11/06 at 19:17h GMT:

Hi – First, thank you! Your add-on is much appreciated.

Like other users, I also have more than 1000 contacts, and would love LOVE love to be able to get rid of duplicates. I haven’t found any mentions of an update, so I thought I would ask to see if there’s been any progress on this. Do you have a mailing list for this add-on? If there’s anyway I could be updated when this feature is available, I’d be most appreciative.

~Nick

Danish Munir on 2007/11/26 at 09:17h GMT:

Hi,

Are you still working on this? If yes, please consider making this OSS, since I’m really interested in this project and am considering starting my own, unless I can get onto something that is already established.

Thanks

amanda on 2007/12/13 at 05:24h GMT:

I’m having a field day with the Add On. Thank you!

I’m only just reigning in my address book so that I can actually use it. That means moving a lot of addresses around at once to get things to a place where I can maintain it.

One thing I’ve noticed: it doesn’t find everything. I’ll run it and it will chug through about a dozen or so (actually it seems to be around 30 where it craps out) duplicates and then say it is done, when it clearly is not. If I run it again, it finds more. And not just more duplicates of the same entry. I’ll run it once and not even get past the Cs. I broke my address book out in to multiple address books so I’m running it on books of ~600 or so.

My one request, since I somehow wound up with a whole lot of really duplicated entries — identical ones — it would be nice if it could do one pass and give me a list that says “these are identical” so that I can yay or nay them all at once.

amanda on 2007/12/13 at 07:45h GMT:

@Christoph if you run “Find and Manage Duplicates” Marian’s email address is at the closing dialog.

@Mike Marian might have a different answer, but … huh? “you can google the thunderbird thing with debian”? That doesn’t make any sense at all, not to me anyway. Wikipedia seems to suggest that the only difference between the two mail clients is the name and the llicense. Do you have any insights about why a Thunderbird addon might not work with Icedove? I see a few forum posts that indicate that this could be the case, but no one points to any reasons why. Do you know more about this?

amanda on 2007/12/13 at 18:52h GMT:

eek! a real bug.

I have a contact named “Raizes do Brasil” — email for my capoeira instructors. I also have a contact list named “Raizes do Brasil” where I’d listed all people in my addressbook who I know through capoeira.

Not that you need that much detail, but whatever.

Duplicates just identified the list and the individual contact as duplicates and since the latter was more complete I wound up deleting the contact list. Clearly, the sky didn’t fall, but the Addon should identify lists somehow and distinguish them from individual contacts so that that doesn’t happen.

PJTraill on 2007/12/27 at 18:45h GMT:

The Mozilla add-on site has a number of appealing suggestions, in particular tweaking the UI to make it easy to copy fields from one to the other.
One idea for removal of duplicate entries is to have a button Remove Duplicate, only active if both sides are identical. This makes it easy to chuck out duplicates without the risk of eliminating a non-duplicate due to a timing error, and with the possibility of looking out for things that are not really duplicate (if it is possible that the add-on be confused), or that are intentional.
I should also appreciate an option to automatically choose the entry with more fields filled, if two are otherwise identical.
I also hope you will find time to provide a function to merge differing entries from an address book.

As to the suggestion that this could replace the Thunderbird Address manager, that seems implausible. But I do wish that were more flexible: what about people with more than one address, or more than 2 e-mail addresses, …?

maxus on 2008/01/17 at 22:35h GMT:

The new version 0.4 regards every entry with the same first name as duplicates, even if the seconde name is differnt. Thats very annoying, as I know about ten Peters, none of which is a duplicate .