Address Book Clearout is intended for organizing your contacts. In this regard, this application can find and delete not only identical but also near-duplicate entries.
The application’s interface is quite straightforward. There is a panel on the left from where you can navigate different address books and categories within them. Likewise, there are three other panels to view details of the currently selected category, the company and the person correspondingly. When you hover your mouse pointer over conflictive data, the tool shows a description of the problem found.
The utility can quickly scan various databases, supporting a large number of contact entries as well as various accounts, including social media accounts linked to your main address book. Fortunately, the application can detect several types of problems, such as exact duplicates and redundant and outdated info.
Good news is that the app prevents accidental data loss. For instance, duplicate contacts can be viewed before deciding to eliminate them. Besides, it is good that you can compare data side by side, which allows you to merge entries by dragging a given field from one card and dropping it on another. Similarly, you can also edit specific texts to fix any issues. Likewise, you can undo any operation on the fly. What is more, the application creates archived copies of all the discarded entries, which lets you recover them in case anything goes wrong.
All in all, Address Book Clearout may be the application you have been looking for to clean the mess in your contact lists. It worked perfectly for me and its latest version supports Big Sur; however, there is a history of complaints about crashes, which should not be taken for granted. The product can be purchased from the Mac App Store at a reasonable price.
Pros
- Supports scanning long lists of contacts and various databases
- Detects several types of problems
- Allows side-by-side comparison of the data
- Creates archived copies of discarded data
Cons
- Reports of crashes