Treat a shared value as a clue
Duplicate suggestions compare supported phone and email keys. Phone comparison removes common punctuation but preserves the international prefix and extension. It does not guess a country code or treat a local number as an international one. Email comparison trims outer whitespace and lowercases the domain; it preserves the local part’s case and does not remove dots or plus aliases.
These conservative keys still do not identify a person. A household can share a landline, and a team can share a mailbox. The tool therefore presents pairs for review. It does not merge similarly spelled names or automatically collapse a chain of suggestions. Select a pair, compare its fields and leave separate records when their identity is uncertain.
Choose which record supplies single-value fields
The primary record supplies the formatted name, structured name, UID, birthday and other fields that the supported merge model treats as single values. Distinct email, phone, address and note properties remain in the merged record. Exact ungrouped duplicate properties are removed, while grouped label relationships stay together.
The preview lists alternate single-value fields before you apply a merge. Those alternatives remain in review JSON and the original sources, even though the export uses the primary choice. If you choose the wrong primary record, undo the last change and repeat the merge. An identical contact count is not the goal; the goal is a record whose fields still describe the right person.
Keep normalization intentional
The optional normalization action trims email edges and removes supported phone punctuation. It retains plus prefixes, leading zeros and extensions, and leaves unsupported phone expressions unchanged. It does not verify that a number exists or that an email can receive mail. Comparison keys are computed separately, so you can review suggestions without rewriting any source values.
Use the field inspector for small corrections. Structured names and addresses are shown as component arrays so that punctuation inside a value is not mistaken for a separator. Save deliberately and review the new preview. Undo reverses one contact change, while the source archive remains the long-term record of what was originally supplied.