Making contact sharing easier to follow.

October 25 brought guided Contacts setup, more careful duplicate matching, clearer synchronization progress and a simpler Online Accounts page, shaped by the first hands-on use.

October 25 took Contacts and Online Accounts from their first integrated version into hands-on use. Moving existing Mail accounts into the shared account service worked without another sign-in, but sharing contacts exposed problems that isolated tests had not fully represented: long waits, unclear progress, provider differences and suggestions that grouped different people together.

The day’s changes focus on making those operations easier to understand and less disruptive. They are development improvements, not a claim that every account or address book is now covered.

A setup that says what will happen

Contacts now offers a guided setup when an account has not been set up for contact sharing. Instead of asking someone to understand terms such as joining lists, it asks whether to Share my contacts with this account or Keep this account’s contacts on their own. Work accounts start with the separate choice.

The flow saves backup copies, shows people listed more than once, and offers choices to combine them, look first or skip for now. A Ready step explains what each account will receive. Nothing is sent to those accounts until Update my accounts is chosen; progress follows that decision.

The same language carries through the window, Settings and maintained help. Sharing remains a choice about where contacts will be copied, rather than an automatic consequence of adding an account.

More careful matching, with finer control

A shared home or office phone number is not enough to establish that two contacts are one person. Matching was tightened so different names and widely shared contact details do not casually connect unrelated people. Duplicate groups also require their members to match one another, avoiding chains where one weak connection pulls several people together. Name suffixes are handled more carefully, too.

When only part of a suggested group belongs together, you can now tick the cards to combine and leave the others alone. Not this person keeps one card apart from the rest. The kept-apart list offers Suggest again if that decision needs to change later.

Contacts also gained automatic combining for new, high-confidence duplicates arriving through updates, imports or sharing. That option is on unless turned off, with a choice in setup and the menu’s Combine people listed more than once automatically switch. Existing duplicates and uncertain matches still wait for a person’s decision. Automatic combines are reported and can be undone.

These are matching rules, not proof of identity. Reviewing suggestions remains important, especially before combining information across accounts.

Useful progress while the window stays usable

Sharing a large address book should not leave the rest of the window waiting behind a long send. Previews, edits and combines can now get a turn while synchronization continues, instead of waiting for an entire account to finish.

Account rows show how much has been updated and an estimate of the time remaining. Supported Google and Microsoft creation requests use batches, and sending to different accounts can proceed in parallel. The implementation still respects each provider’s pacing and responses; parallel work is not a promise of instant synchronization.

One contact that cannot be written no longer automatically stops all the other contacts from being sent. Account-wide failures can still pause an account, and individual refusals are shown for follow-up.

Handling what an account actually keeps

Real use exposed provider differences that need more than a successful request status. CardDAV writes are checked against what the server kept. If a provider leaves out some phone numbers or other supported list items, Contacts explains that difference while retaining the fuller card locally. A changed or missing card can instead be reported as a refusal.

Outlook’s limits on phone numbers, addresses and other fields are applied before sending. Photo handling was corrected so an unavailable local image is not mistaken for a request to remove it from other accounts.

Another correction addresses a server creating a contact even though its response reported failure. Contacts tries to recognize that remote copy instead of repeatedly adding, combining and recreating it. Failed writes back off, repeated automatic combines have a stop condition, and notices are coalesced so a recurring problem does not produce a continuous stream of alerts.

These changes target observed cases. They do not establish identical behavior across all CardDAV servers or every provider account.

Clearer account management and everyday selection

Online Accounts now presents a list beside the selected account’s details. Each row gives a short status, while the detail area concentrates the Mail and Contacts switches, sharing choice and relevant actions. Narrow windows switch to a list-and-detail flow with Back or Escape; keyboard navigation and spoken row names are included.

Contacts gained visible selection controls as well as Ctrl-click, Shift-click and select-all. Several contacts can be deleted together after confirmation, or restored together from Recently Deleted. Plain clicking was corrected to select only the clicked contact, and deleting a card now moves to a nearby contact rather than jumping back to the top.

Checks and remaining limits

The added regression coverage includes previews during an active send, parallel account updates, provider refusals, retry loops, shared phone numbers and selection behavior. An isolated window test exercises the guided setup without sending before its final confirmation. The mouse-selection regression was recorded failing before its correction and passing afterward on a private test display.

The end-of-day development record reports the updated Contacts and Online Accounts versions installed, synchronization working on the development computer, and a positive review of the account-page layout. That is a useful real-machine check, not universal provider validation. The available records do not establish a full test-suite run covering every final change.

Longer use, more account configurations, accessibility checks and careful observation of automatic matching remain part of the work. This entry records progress through October 25; public release preparation continues separately.