Merge Multiple Gmail Contacts

If you’re feeling a bit adventurous and you want to test out some of Gmail’s newer experimental features that might mess up your account if you run into a bug, then you might want to try out Gmail’s brand new Merge Contacts feature.

Merge Contacts still does not yet run automatically, so you need to manually find the contacts you want to merge, but it’s useful if you don’t have too many duplicates. Althought if you have like a thousand people in your addressbook it will be a nightmare to sort, won’t it?

But if you’re willing to sort through hundreds of contacts (or maybe if you’re just really that anal-retentive), why not try it out? To merge your contacts, just select two or more entries for the same person, click on “Merge these contacts” and magically, Google will combine the information from the selected contacts. So if you have like ten different emails for, say, “Peter Jalbert,” all the emails will show up under one account and your Contacts will be 9 entries less.

There’s also a new view called “My Contacts” that supposedly organizes your contacts, but in reality it will just confuse people more. Under My Contacts, you’ll see:

• My Contacts – “a place to import, store and view all of the contact information that’s important to you”
• All Contacts – “these are all of your contacts”
• Suggested Contacts – “the people you have contacted frequently”
• Most Contacted – “contacts you email and chat with the most”

This is nice and all, but I don’t think I can go sifting through all my friends and adding them up one by one until Gmail makes the process automatic. It’s too tedious for me to go about. But it wouldn’t hurt if you guys tried it out, won’t it? So, what about you, have you guys tried this already?

If you’re curious to do this, just head over to Gmail’s contact manager and merge your contacts away!