Pending Merges
When a Google contact and a manual contact look like the same person, Remy asks — it doesn't decide for you.
Overview
When you connect Google to a Remy that already has manual contacts, sooner or later the same person ends up on both sides. You added Alice manually a month ago; she's also in your Google book. Now there are two of her.
Remy could try to merge them automatically. It deliberately doesn't.
The cost of a bad merge — fields overwritten, notes attributed to the wrong person, an introduction chain re-pointed — is hard to undo. The cost of a duplicate is mild: you see Alice twice in the list until you resolve it. Remy stays on the conservative side.
How Duplicates Are Detected
Remy flags a pending merge when the same email address appears on both a Google-sourced contact and a manual contact you added in Remy.
That's the only signal Remy uses. Specifically:
- Exact email match → flagged as a pending merge.
- Name match without email → not flagged. Two people named "John Smith" without a shared email won't be merged.
- Same company, different emails → not flagged.
Fuzzy matching is not done by design. The cost of getting it wrong is too high.
Resolving a Pending Merge
Open Settings → Integrations to see any pending merges. Each one shows both sides — the Google contact and the manual contact — with the matched email highlighted.
You have two choices.
| Action | What happens |
|---|---|
| Merge | The two contacts become one. Identity (name, phone, company, etc.) is taken from the Google side going forward, since Google owns those fields. Your enrichment from the manual side — notes, tags, "introduced by" — is preserved on the merged record. |
| Dismiss | Remy stops flagging this pair. Both contacts stay in the list as separate people. Use this when the email match is real but they're genuinely different people (shared inbox, etc.). |
Both choices are recorded in the Activity Log as Merge Resolved.
After a Merge
Once merged, the contact behaves like any other Google-sourced contact:
- Identity fields sync from Google on every run.
- Your notes, tags, and "introduced by" link stay attached.
- In bidirectional mode, edits you make in Remy push back to Google like normal.
- The "manual" half is gone — you won't find a duplicate any more.
There is no "unmerge" today. If you merged the wrong pair, the manual contact's identity fields are gone from Remy (they live on in Google as the source of truth, possibly under a different identity now). Notes and tags can be moved to a new contact by hand if needed.
Merge is one-way
Take a moment before clicking. There is currently no undo for a merge.
Frequently Asked Questions
A contact has two emails — one matches a manual contact, one doesn't. What happens?
If any of the Google contact's emails matches any of the manual contact's emails, the pair is flagged. After merging, both emails are kept on the unified record.
What if I want Remy to auto-merge anyway?
There's no setting for that. Pending merges are intentionally a confirmation step, not an opt-in.
Can I bulk-resolve pending merges?
Not today. Each pending merge is a separate decision. If you have many of them after a first sync, plan to spend a few minutes working through them one at a time.
Why isn't a duplicate I can see being flagged?
The most common reason is that the two contacts don't share an exact email. Add the Google contact's email to your manual contact (or vice versa), wait for the next sync, and the pair will be flagged.
What if I dismiss by accident?
Dismissed pairs aren't re-flagged automatically — Remy assumes you meant to dismiss. To get the pair back into the queue, change one of the emails so the match breaks, then change it back; the next sync will detect the match again as new.
Google Contacts Sync
How Remy keeps your contact book aligned with Google — what flows where, who owns which fields, and what happens when both sides change at once.
Why Some Deletes Are Blocked
In read-only sync mode, Remy refuses to delete a Google contact — because the next sync would resurrect it. Here's what to do instead.