ContactsMate by Cisdem is a supplemental contacts manager for Mac that can help you clean up duplicate contacts, delete contacts, fix suffixes, prefixes, and unusual character names or just a first name.
When you open ContactsMate you are greeted with a screen that asks for permission to access your contacts.
Once you do this, you have a screen that looks similar to this:
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On the left you have all your iCloud/Gmail groups. In the main pane you have your currently selected contact.
Scanning Contacts
Scanning contacts is relatively simple and fast, depending on how many contacts you have. I have around 850, with about 80-100 duplicates.
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Fixing Contacts
You have the option of merging, deleting, deleting the duplicates, or ignoring the conflict.
Batch merging of duplicate contacts froze the app. I had to force quit the app. This caused data loss— a lot of my contacts were simply deleted. Luckily, I have BusyContacts, which I will share a screencast on later. BusyContacts allows for multiple backups, which really saved me, and it syncs with iCloud and multiple services.
Merging contacts one by one resulted in deleted contacts as well. Some were missing names, some were missing numbers, some were just flat out deleted. What I needed from the app is to merge the contacts, which it did not do well.
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Fixing Other Problems
As with the other fixes, I lost names, numbers, and other data that could tell me who was who in my contacts. I had to restore from another BusyContacts backup to get my data back. I didn’t try to delete the duplicate as I wouldn’t know which one was being deleted. It doesn’t give much control over which one is the right one, or other granular controls.
Conclusion
The app is slow and has frozen up a couple times when moving around it. If you have a lot of contacts, fixing them all is something that will freeze the app, causing you to force close it and lose data. It doesn’t give options for granular control over your contacts and if you are a power user, like me, this is a deal breaker. I would not recommend this app, right now, as it is. I hope the developers improve the app to make it more feature rich, and consider speeding it up, fixing the bugs that left me without the contacts I most needed for a while.
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