Merging email and phone contacts for the iPhone

This has nothing to do with iPhone lawsuits but I have recently purchased my first iPhone (waited for: 3G, GPS, Apps, Exchange) and I went through quite an ordeal to merge my phone and email address books. If you don't own an iPhone you might be wondering why I went through this and the simple answer is the iPhone email interface. So without further ado, my merger story:

• BACKUP!! I failed to heed this critical tenant at one point and almost lost my entire address book.
  
  
  
  • For your iPhone contacts I recommend Funambol
  
  
  • For your email client there should be some built sort of export/backup util. Just make a copy (or two!) of your current address book


• First I Synced my old Nokia via bluetooth with my wife's mac because it just sticks all the contacts in the osx address book.


• Then I attempted to migrate the contacts into thunderbird. I was not able to find a fool proof way to do this. A To G will allow you to sync your contacts to google but it missed a lot of my phone numbers for some reason. From there I used zindus to get them into thunderbird. If I were to do it over again I would take the CSV file that A to G generates and manually edit it down to a much simpler CSV file. Then I would import it into thunderbird.


• Ok, so now you have a giant address book (in my case 500+) with lots of duplicates. One contact for the email address, one or more for the phone number(s).
  
  • Using the thunderbird addon Duplicate Contact Manager I went through and merged all of my contacts.
  • The tool could use some interface improvements but it is far easier than anything else I could find. The tool would not only let me choose which of the duplicate contacts to delete, but it also lets you copy data from one contact to the other. This makes merging the email contact and phone contact a breeze.


• BACKUP!!!! (this is the step I missed and it cost me many hours and almost my entire address book)


• I Deleted all of my contacts from gmail because the sync tool kept putting back duplicates that I wanted to deleted.


• I then went into Zindus in thunderbird (Tools -> Zindus), hit "RESET" (CRITICAL) and then hit "Sync"


• I already had my iPhone setup to sync contacts from google so I just plugged in my iPhone and viola! My contacts were merged.


• If you leave zindus in place then all 3 of your address books (iPhone, gmail, thunderbird) will be kept in sync goodness.

Website Idea: Contacts/address book merging tool. It would grab contacts from email clients, webmail clients, csv files, vcards and social networking sites. Then a combination of wizbang duplicate merger and user input (with lots of backup and undo functionality) would merge all the contacts together. Of course you would then need to be able to export all the contacts to a myriad of sources as well. Throw in an iPhone app and you have a pretty slick tool. Monetizing that tool though!? Not sure.