Random new contacts somehow showing up

[Brent212]

I have an HTC Touch, through Sprint, running Windows Mobile 6.0.

I had all my contacts entered correctly. They all included at least one phone number, and many of them included email addresses. I installed outlook on a computer, synched the phone, and all seemed good. The contacts in outlook appeared to match my phone, and the phone contacts remained as they were.

About two weeks later, and after synching with outlook at least one more time, I noticed a lot of my contacts on the phone were now duplicated. The interesting thing was that one of the duplicates would have a phone number, and the other would have an email address. And the thing that actually made me notice this in the first place was that there were a few contacts that I had never heard of... didn't recognize the names, and they just contained email addresses (there was only 1 instance of each of these... no duplicates).

At first I thought that somehow the duplicates were the result of original contacts that had both email addresses and phone numbers "splitting", to make one with a number, and another with an email. However, it's possible that the originals didn't have emails to begin with, and new contacts were just added containing emails addresses only.

So what I'm guessing happened is that somehow new contacts were either added to my phone contacts list, or my outlook contacts list, when I sent email to people. The names that I didn't recognize were probably from big group emails where I'd hit "reply to all". The thing is, I don't use outlook on the computer that I'm synching my phone with at all. I do use outlook express. Do outlook express contacts automatically get added to outlook contacts?

I actually think it must have somehow happened on my phone only, because I don't think my outlook contacts list ever had these new contacts. I'm using the "stock" messaging program that came with the Touch. So can it create new contacts when you send and/or receive emails? I don't think it's happened since (it's been a little over a week). I just hope it doesn't happen again, because it was a pain in the *** to merge all those contacts.