I spent close to an hour on the phone with ATT&T and Samsung last night hoping to find a solution to this issue, but what I got from a level-3 rep at Samsung is not what I wanted to hear, so I hope someone here has a solution.
When I try to create a new text message and click on the contacts button within the create message screen, my contacts list comes up showing multiple entries for each contact. This includes contacts with only email addresses, even though I have messaging set to show only contacts with phone numbers.
The suggestion is that the contacts are on my phone, SIM card and in Gmail. The Samsung tech recommends having ATT&T wipe the SIM and doing a hard reset on the phone.

Once that is done I should import the contacts from Gmail to the phone.
Any other ideas on this???