Over 50 Copies of each contact on cloud, iPhone, iPad - Find Duplicate Crashes

For those who are unfortunate enough to have a similar issue, here's how I ultimately solved it.

First I backed up and cleaned up my contacts address book.

Using an app that I purchased from the Apple Store, I was able to export all ~+25,500 contacts to a CSV format which I was then able to edit in MS Excel (any spreadsheet program should work) I set up a column in Excel with a formula to identify rows which were duplicated and then used that to filter out the duplicates. I was left with about 800 contacts which I saved again as a CSV.

I did a lot of clean up in Excel. Got rid of all of the Notations referencing Outlook and Read Only etc. Was much easier to make batch changes in Excel.

Next, I opened my Address Book on my Mac Pro desktop and also on the iCloud web service/page. I selected all of the contacts in each and deleted them all. I had to do this several times over three days. Many contacts kept reappearing, first on the iCloud Contacts page and then the Mac Pro. The iPhone always had all 25K Contacts till this afternoon.

Once the iCloud and my Mac Pro Contacts had been deleted, I then uploaded the clean CSV file that I had created in Excel.

Only that part took me many hours to figure out.

Somehow, extra Return/Paragraph would become part of the exported CSV file when I viewed it in MS Word. Set the MS Word view settings to reveal formatting. If there is a single extra paragraph entry in the file, Apple Contacts will reject the upload. There is one good source for how to format the CSV file so that it will work. You can't have quotation marks or other special characters in your Address Book Contact records or the CSV file won't work.

Once I had a clean set of Contacts on my Mac Pro and iCloud, I then went to my iPhone (Settings/Apple ID/iCloud) and then turned off Contacts. It asked me what I wanted to do with my Contacts on my iPhone. I chose to Delete the Contacts. At that point, I then turned the Setting (Apps Using iCloud) back on/green. For the first time in months, my iPhone now works properly and I've got no duplicates nor any Contacts with hyperlinks to ms-outlook://people/etc etc etc.

I have over 60 copies of each contact in the Apple Contacts application.

In MS Outlook for Mac (v16.42), my contacts are not duplicated. The issue only is apparent in Apple Contacts.

In Contacts, each duplicated contact contains a hyperlink which begins with ms-outlook://people/XXXXX where XXXX is a long string of upper and lower case characters and numbers.

In the 'notes' section there appears a the following message:

"This contact is read only. To make changes, tap the link above to edit in Outlook."

In some cases, that message appears over and over with \\\ or \\\\n\\\ appearing randomly in the text.

If I don't stop the cause of the replication (a loop of some kind) it will keep happening and it could take several hundred hours to manually edit my contacts!

Contacts just hangs when you ask it to merge duplicate contacts. Left it alone for 40 hours and still it was hung.

Contacts Cleaner app has same issue.

Thanks. I did create a new admin account and linked my iCloud account but I still can not eliminate the duplicates. The MS Outlook hyperlinks in each contact make me feel that there's something going on between outlook and contacts that's preventing Contacts from purging the duplicates. I have about 150 read contacts but my address book is now 26 thousand entries.

Is there a way to export the contact dbase in a CSV or other file I can edit in Excel or Word. Can I delete all the contacts and then upload the CSV?

My contact list of ~825 is now over 26 thousand because of duplicate contacts which all have notations such as 

"This contact is read only. Tap the link to edit contact in MS-Outlook:\\People########## where ## is a hash of about three lines long of numbers and characters. There is no link and copying the url into a browser does not work.

Oddly, there are no duplicated contacts in MS Outlook for Mac or on the Outlook.com web page.

I bought third party application to allow me to export the contacts to a spreadsheet where I could edit the records and save as a CSV to upload. Took me only about 3 hours to figure out that MS was inserting paragraph line breaks in the middle of individual records/contacts. Had to do a workaround to get a clean set of 800 contacts to upload correctly.

I've tried to delete all of my contacts on the iCloud and on my Mac Pro OS X Contacts Application but the MS "Read Only" duplicates seem to reappear on iCloud and my iPhone a while after I've deleted everything.

The idea was to get rid of all the corrupted contacts and upload a clean set but the &^%$##$ MS "Read Only" contacts keep respiring like an alien life form. How do I exorcise my computer of MS artifacts?

I've spent two whole business days on this problem. I've created a new admin account, and done every step suggested on Apple and Microsoft web/support pages. No joy. 

My productivity is zero for two days b/c my iPhone, computer and iPad are crippled by the overhead of processing over 25K in spurious duplicated contacts.

No Bueno.

Delete Manually 25K Contacts? That’s your advise? Wow. Thanks!

If I were to use the two Export options (abbu) or VCard, i’d have no ability to mass edit.

As I’ve said, and will repeat, I have used a purchased application to export the Contacts Address Book to CSV and then did my edits in Excel. I now have a clean CSV file with ~800 Contacts and now duplicates.

i have on three instances deleted all of my Address Book/Contacts on both icloud and my Mac Pro. And each time, these MS-Outlook://People Read Only” emails re-appear on the cloud and then on my iphone/ipads.

My goal is to clean delete of everything and start with the CSV upload of clean contacts.

Some individual contacts are duplicated 75 times or more. I have about 800 real contacts. Yes. I have now 25k contacts which causes Contacts to freeze when i chose Merge Duplicates.

Regarding the CSV file format for uploading to Apple Contacts. As I tried/failed to properly explain above, the format of the file and the contents are very specifically limited and must be observed. It took me about a dozen attempts over many hours to get the format correct. I wish I could find the one very hard to find reference on the web that gave me the best formatting tips. On the Apple Support page there is the instruction/rule that there can not be any spaces before or after the commas in the comma separated values file format. As I mentioned above, quotation marks are proscribed also. And I mentioned that I was getting spurious/unwanted paragraph entries within individual contact records when exported from excel to CSV. In Excel, each contact is on its own row and each column represents a field such as Last Name, Mobile Phone # etc. When exported to CSV, there should be a LineFeed or Return character after each spreadsheet row but I was getting extras. That means that there were not the same number of commas between each paragraph character. That will be rejected. Each contact needs to have the same number of commas whether or not there's any content in between commas.

In order to get my CSV file fixed without doing manual edits, I did a work around. I created a new column in Excel at the end (to the right) of the Contact records/row where I put XX in each row (copy/paste). When I exported this file to CSV and opened it in MS Word, I was able to do a search and remove all of the paragraph marks (search for "^r") Then I did a find/replace substituting the Paragraph Mark ("^r") for XX. That got me a clean CSV without extra paragraph marks.