How to Wipe Badly Imported Contacts from iCloud

Question

My boss has a MacBook Air and an iPhone, and pays for iCloud. We also use Outlook here. We discovered that her contacts weren't being synced properly between her phone and Contacts.app, and attempted to merge them. What we've discovered instead is that we've somehow created inexact duplicates, with the duplicates containing vCard flags marking what kind of data each contact is using:

I don't recall exactly what we did to achieve this - I assume we imported some vCards and hoped that iCloud would sort through the duplicates - but is there any way to erase these contacts without manually stepping through, and has anyone seen this before and can advise how to stop this happening in the future?

Answer 1

Run a search for data that would show up in a corrupt vCard, but not a legitimate one. For example: "type=VOICE". You may have to do this several times with different strings. I would take the results and export them before selecting all (⌘ A) and deleting them. Make sure you can always undo, if needed.

Answer 2

No, the only way you can fix this is by manually deleting the duplicates. iCloud and Contacts aren't very good about this.

Answer 3

You can log into iCloud's site, navigate to the contacts page then you can either individually select contacts or select all and delete in the lower left hand corner cog. This requires you have iCloud syncing enabled for contacts.