Cleaning Day

We already have a housekeeper, but I need a computer cleaner. Sure I can do the usual maintenance on our computers, but what gets out of hand are the address books in the various e-mail programs. 

For a sense of security to battle forgetfulness, I have all of my e-mail accounts set so that anyone I write to is automatically entered into the address book, so I never lose important contact information. 

The problem is that people write to me via different accounts and I write back from different accounts. I have six different Gmail accounts for different reasons, our business accounts, and then some miscellaneous stragglers. All of the mail is downloaded into my IncrediMail program, but sometimes I am cleaning spam out of a Gmail account, I see new mail and write back. Now that address is in that Gmail account, but not in my IncrediMail program. 

Yesterday, I exported all of my IM contact list and then imported it into my primary Gmail account. Then I exported that and imported it into my school Gmail account. Once more, an export of that list went into my mobile phone Gmail account. Now I had a total of 2,269 contacts.

I spent half the day yesterday going through and deleting contacts I know longer need. Gmail has a wonderful feature that gives the option of looking for duplicates and merging them. That worked what looked like wonders at first, but only brought me down to 2,013 contacts. It was the multiple first names that threw it off. When you have 22 Balazses, most with different e-mail addresses, Gmail is stymied. Nineteen Enikos or twelve Viktors will do it in too. This meant opening each contact to see if it needed editing or deleting.

With a lot of time and patience, I whittled the list down to 835. If you were expecting to hear from me again, I may have deleted your address, so you had better drop me a line.

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