Solving Duplicate Contact with Scrubly.com

With all the different contact management, on-line address book, and synchronization services that I try out throughout the year, I am constantly in search of the ultimate de-duplication tool to fix all the issues that pop-up utterly destroying my contact list.

Today, I am proud to announce that I think I have finally found it- scrubly.com

I don't remember where I first heard about scrubly.com, but I am extremely grateful that I did.

The "Express Scrub" is exactly what it sounds like.  As the description above states, it:

"Only removes exact duplicates and combines contacts that are 100% safe to merge.  This path will miss some potential duplicates, but it's super fast and easy and will catch most duplicates."

The other method, and the one I prefer/endorse is the "Deep Scrub".  First, it will run the "Express Scrub":

THEN it goes several steps further by giving you THE most finely grained search for duplicates I have ever seen.  

For example, it runs a search looking for contacts in your address book that have the same phone numbers:

It will also look for Blank Contacts:

Contacts with "Matching Names".

This is the biggest step and the one you definitely want to run through manually.  Why?  Because let's say you have 5 different "Steve"s or 4 different "Lauren"s, each with their own unique last name.  Or, maybe you have your own family in your address book, so there are several contacts with the same last name, but unique first names.  This search thinks they are all the same, but using the manual process, you can weed through each one individually and tell the service they need to be kept separate.

Contacts with Compatible Phone or Email fields:

And finally, Junk Contacts

Scrubly says that "Junk contacts contain only limited information and can be deleted."

I don't like to take anything for chance, so I will "Click to Clean".

After each search completed, you are presented with the results and 2 options:

Guess which one I recommend?  Manually of course.

I'm not going to walk you through the entire process of reviewing your individual contacts, but needless to say it is extremely simple, straightforward, customizable, and powerful.

When you are finally done, you are given a report of the entire process:

As you can see, these changes currently only exist on the Scrubly server and will not be sent back to your address book until you tell it to.

By the way, if you are worried that you lost a contact or a contact's information during this process, Scrubly will also back-up your address as it was before it was scrubbed clean.

Scrubly works with your Gmail address book and has downloadable connectors for both Outlook and Mac Mail:

 

 

Update on Saturday, November 5, 2011 at 02:39PM by Marc Kaplan

After writing this review, I signed a deal to have Scrubly as a sponsor of this blog.

As my reader, you can save 10% on a Scrubly subscription by going to:

http://www.scrubly.com/user/register/special/stayinginsync