Deduping records in address book

Question

I have many duplicate records since porting various address and email address from my PC to my new Mac. I have tried to dedup the address book by using the pulldown menu item "Look for duplicate entries". However, when I use it, Address Book crashes. I have about 10,000 total records in my address book. Is there some sort of limit or time-out that prevents address book from finding my duplicates?

Answer 1

I don't know why it is crashing, but quite possibly on some badly-formatted contact record. The trouble I find with AB's duplicate finding (and this may have been fixed - I am still on 10.4.9) is that it doesn't tell you which entries are duplicates, so you can't tell if you are about to merge 20 duplicate "John Smith"s - who are in fact different people.
You can try this little script, which I suspect will run very slowly with your big address book, if indeed it doesn't join Address Book in crashing - I have never tried it with more than 500. Also note it is untested on 10.4.11, so use File/Backup before trying it. If you run it as-is, it will list the duplicates it finds in the Script Editor result pane, giving you an opportunity to check before deleting. To allow it to delete, uncomment the "delete APerson" line.
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>