Contact details merged or mixed up

Since about half a year I noticed a strange behaviour regarding contacts. I first saw it on my own home contact: In the list of incoming calls there was a wrong name showed together with my home number. Or, in another words: when my wife called me from our home phone, I saw the number together with a wrong name. Because the adress-book in the phone app is directly linked with the contact app, the same fault appeared there. When I try to look for my own name I’ll get no result, when I look for the name, which was shown, I find a contact with my and his details together in one entry.
Nearly all contacts came from my Outlook adress book at the exchange server at work, as well as these two.
First I thought, it was an Outlook mistake, because I found an item with my contact details but in the “save as” column was the wrong name. So I corrected the item and delete the other contact from Outlook.
But some days later, another wrong name appeared, when my wife called me. In Outlook both contacts were apart from each other, but in the fairphone they were merged together and to be found under the wrong name.
So I deleted the contact which belonged to this wrong name. But next day, the fairphone picked another item and merged it with my own.
I deleted that contact also, for one day it was okay, but then, you might guess, next day, another item was merged with my own.
I found no rule, which contact will be picked for merging. Also I didn’t delete the wrong contacts completely but moved them in another folder in Outlook. But I can move them back, they won’t be picked again.
Then I was thinking about why its my own item, which will be mixed up. But yesterday I saw another item, also mixed up.
To make it clear: in Outlook all items are apart and ok (I can see this also in my old palm handheld, which I still synchronize with Outlook).
Because I load the whole company-adressbook to my Outlook, there are about 6000 contacts, too much to find merged items easily (it sounds a bit silly but I did this to have all contacts offline in the palm handheld, before having a smartphone with online adress book)
By starting to find some I noticed, that I can find a merged item by a name, but after opening the item, I see only the other name. Furthermore, it seems, that some details (e.g. telephone numbers) are shown all, some details can only be shown for one contact (e.g. the name).
I just found one item, where two items belong to the same person, they were also merged.
I also just found, by opening such an item to edit, all informations, all details of both merged items can be seen, not mixed as in the normal sight, but first one item, then the other, but in the same editing screen.
And the top of confusion: I found an item which seems to be merged from four items, because in the editing screen there are four parts, each starting with the source of this item, Microsoft Exchange contact.
But the details came from only three items, two with the same family name and partly same adress, an another complete different one.
Conclusion: there is somthing totally scrubby in my adress book.
So: does anyone have the same problem?
And what might be the solution??

The android contact manager has the ability to group (or merge) different profiles into one contact. This is especially handy if you have information about one contact from several sources (say your Outlook address book, Gmail contacts, and Facebook). I do this very often manually and I don’t know how this could be done automatically. For you, it seems, this has happened automatically with contacts that don’t belong to eachother.

One way of separating joined contacts is this:

  1. Open the contact.
  2. Edit the contact by pressing the menu button and selecting Edit
  3. Press the menu button again and select Separate
  4. Now both (all) previously joined contacts should show up separately in your contact list again.

This has to be done for each and every contact that was merged wrong. Maybe the Internet knows a way of doing this in bulk.

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I did as you said and indeed, it worked.
It seems, that now there are more contacts as before. The second contact, I wanted to split, wasn’t merged any more, but the third, which I remembered from yesterday, was still merged, so I split it.
So this is another way to get two contacts from one (the first one was my way to move and restore one of these contacts, which takes more time).
But there are still two questions: Why happens this automatically and which are the rules, to recognize two contacts as linked. I still see no common detail between some of the merged contacts.

But thank you for this information, it helps to understand this issue. I didn’t know about the group function.

Roland

This should never happen automatically. In fact it is the first time I hear something like this here. Maybe it has happened to other Android users (I don’t think that this is FP1-specific). If you find something in the internet, let us know! :slight_smile: