Patent ID: 8745144

Claim:
A method to be executed at least in part in a computing device for persisting unified contact information in a mailbox, the method comprising: retrieving contact information from a plurality of internal and external data sources through a communication service, the contact information including name, address, telephone number, user id, email address, status, position, title, presence information, availability and location; determining a relevance of each contact based on the contact information, communication heuristics, corporate directory meta-data, and messaging data in linking contacts; aggregating the retrieved contact information by linking the contacts with a logic person object employing communication patterns as a heuristic, wherein the linked contacts and the logic person object are persisted in a mailbox of the communication service; presenting a unified contact view to a user through a user interface of a client application associated with the communication service based on the logic person object; enabling the user to edit the aggregated contact information through the unified contact view; and modifying the logic person object and at least one linked contact based on the edited contact information.