Clients at WriteThat.name can have 10,000, 20,000, even 50,000 contacts in their address books.
If all online, this can slow down both your mobile and browser. Furthermore, if 30% of them are duplicates or out of date (which is often the case)… well, that’s a problem no one wants to have (and many do)!
SOLUTION: Erase and recreate
Yep, and while it seems like a drastic option, many do just that. That being said, when leaving Duplicate or Address Book overload Hell… it’s best to be safe.
SPECIFIC STEPS
- Export all of your google contacts into a .csv as shown here in the export action. (This is your local backup)
- Stop any syncs you might have
- Delete all of your google contacts by reverting back to V1 of google contacts here, selecting all and then delete. NB Besides your local backup which you can import at anytime (or only certain contacts), you can also “restore” any changes within google contacts up to a month afterwards.
- Then considering launch flashback to repopulate your address book with the most up-to-date and pertinent results, and if you realize you’re missing anything, you can manually restore one or two contacts via your local backup. Flashback can do just your past year of communications, or we’ve done as far back as 7 years for a few clients that wanted to boost their mailing lists.
- NB Some flashbacks can be rather large even if they are a single year ie this TechCrunch journalist’s was HUGE!
But, please don’t take my word for the value of such a drastic option… take theirs 😉
After years in “Address book Hell”, and after having tried all kinds of solutions to clean up & merge my 6000+ contacts that swelled into 45000 contacts, I finally resorted to the most radical solution. Namely, to delete all my Google contacts (Yikes!) I must say that at first I was hesitant, but WriteThatname cleaned up the mess and repopulated my Google contacts fresh again.
–Net Jacobsson, serial entrepreneur who blogs here.
[My 4-year Flashback] was awesome! It saved me 1 month of work, literally! This is a true time and life saver. I’ve already found it to come in handy – the other day I was able to lookup the contact info of someone who just emailed me while I was on the road.
–Scot Frank, Co-Founder & CEO, One Earth Designs
[My bloated address book] was years in the making, starting with Eudora (I still miss that app), then Outlook Express, Outlook, and then some Google/Plaxo/BlackBerry sync magic, Linkedin imports, iPhone contacts, etc — all resulting in a messy address book with lots of dupes, out-of-date contacts, and bloat. I would guess maybe 1/4 were actually accurate, if that.
[After hitting the reset button], the biggest thing for me was to get my contacts cleaned up so that they were up-to-date & accurate, and actually useful. The other piece was that once you had a few thousands contacts in your contact manager, most mobile apps that utilize contacts struggle with performance – so getting that number down to something manageable made a big difference.
–Raanan Bar-Cohen, bizdev at @Automattic
and he also wrote “Hitting the Reset Button on My Contacts” here.
As a recruiter, I have a large network of over 10,000 people in my gmail contacts. Over the years and after setting up various syncs with my iPhone, CRM, etc., it had become an absolute mess with hundreds of dupes (ones that Gmail de-duper was not clearing up for some reason) and after discovering and researching “writethatname” by Kwaga, I backed up my trashy google contacts file (just in case) and then wiped out all of my contacts and let “write that name’s” Flashback product go through my 345,000 emails over the last 4-5 years and reconstruct my contacts records. It worked great and brought back a much cleaner and more complete set of records. In addition, the ongoing product adds 2-5 new contacts to my records each day off of my normal daily communications with people.
–Steve Ganz, Recruiter/Partner/Publishing Management & Sales
at Personnel Associates, Inc.