Address Book Cleanup Utility?

There is a Check for duplicates under the Card menu, but I don't like it as it doesn't let you see which cards are duplicated.

If you want to try Applescript, here is one that I have used a couple of times. If you run it in Script Editor it will display in the Result window a list of duplicates found, based on the name. This gives you an opportunity to review the cards (you might have several John Smiths who are different, so you could give them a different middle name) before taking action. When you are happy with the list displayed remove the "--" at the start of the "delete APerson" line and run the script again; the duplicates (but not the first instance!) will be deleted.

AK

click here to open this script in your editor <pre style="font-family: 'Monaco', 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; overflow:auto; color: #222; background: #DDD; padding: 0.2em; font-size: 10px; width:400px">tell application "Address Book"
set TheLot to {}
set Surplus to {}
set ThePeople to every person
repeat with APerson in ThePeople
if name of APerson is not in TheLot then
set TheLot to TheLot & (name of APerson)
else
set Surplus to Surplus & (name of APerson)
-- delete APerson
end if
end repeat
end tell
Surplus</pre>

I had a similar gripe - 1600 contacts, many with the same email address because they are from the same office. I wanted to send group emails without sending two or three to the same secretary, so I needed to delete the duplicated email addresses from many contacts and merge some duplicated contacts.

A huge task, and Address Book is not up for it. It can't sort contacts by email address. It does offer to "Look for Duplicate Entries" and then blindly merge them, but No thank you!! My contacts are directly related to my income.

Luckily I found this app, Address550 ( http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16586).

It finds duplicate name, email or phone fields and presents them in a display where you can just click on them to bring up the entries in Address Book for editing.

It also offers to merge the entries for you, all at once or one at a time, but I preferred to do it by hand.

Finally, it also finds (and merges if you want) duplicated fields within single contact cards (i.e. from faulty Syncs).

How did I get in this mess in the first place? I exported my contacts from Outlook on the office computer to Entourage at home, then decided Entourage sucked and went to Address Book. Add to that a few syncs with my older mobile phone........it was ugly!