Gmail: address book management is one of Gmail's worst features. It is easy to add addresses, so I can at least back up the contacts from Outlook by exporting them. But the web interface for editing contacts is slow to load and tedious to use; you can never delete anyone who has ever sent a message to your Gmail account; and there is no simple duplicate removal wizard. I will go to some lengths to avoid my Gmail address book contaminating my real address book.
Plaxo: they had a deserved reputation as spammers some years back, but actually had turned that around and were providing a mostly discreet and useful service. In particular, I loved their deduplication wizard. But somehow it all went wrong; they started trying to be Facebook or Twitter, and made it increasingly difficult to manage the information stored on them, which they should have been concentrating on. I have closed my account with them.
UNYK: I have tried this one out, but unfortunately imported my address book more than once, and to deduplicate now means running their wizard and clicking on the "merge contacts" button 4000 times, which I will not do. There is no apparent option to delete your whole database and start again, or I would give it another chance.
It looks like I may have to stick to Outlook / Blackberry, with fingers crossed and occasionally deduplicating by eye, but wondered if anyone out there has any other suggestions?
(Smart-alec suggestions like "Don't use Outlook" will get you banned. Like most people in the real world, I don't have much choice in the matter.)
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device
