Google's Gmail automatically adds people you've had email contact with to your contact list. This is useful, but does mean that you have to clean your contact list every now and then. Fortunately, this is very easy with these 4 steps.
Step 01: Finding Duplicates
Gmail sometimes doesn't recognize that the sender is someone who is already in your contact list and thus you have two different contacts for the same person. Go to your Gmail inbox, click at the top left gmail and select Contacts. Gmail itself checks if you have duplicate contacts and asks if it should merge the duplicate contacts at the top. click on Show Duplicates. If Gmail's suggestion is correct, click after the duplicate To combine. If they are not the same people, choose Close. Also read: 17 tips to manage your email with Inbox by Gmail.
Step 02: Merge Contacts
Sometimes Gmail doesn't recognize a duplicate as such, for example because a name is spelled differently or a contact for a different email address uses a different last name. In this case you can combine people yourself. Mouse over a contact and put a check in the square that appears in front of the name. Do the same for the second name. The text appears at the top 2 selected. On the right you will find an icon with the label To combine. Click on it and Gmail will merge the contacts.
Step 03: Edit Data
Of course you can edit your contacts yourself to remove old email addresses and phone numbers. Mouse over a contact and click on the pencil. To remove a phone number or email address, hover over it and click the cross. Finish by pressing Save to click.
Step 04: Create groups
If you want to better organize your contacts, add them to groups. You create a group by clicking on the left Groups to click and for New group to choose. Enter a name and finish by pressing Create group to click. Click on the red button at the bottom right and select people you want to add to the group. Now if you want to send an email to all contacts in this group, all you need to do is enter the name of the group in the To field of your email. It may take a few minutes for Gmail to index the name of your new group.
