Microsoft Outlook Duplicates Emails Messages
If you are an Outlook user then there is no doubt that number of times you receive an problem of duplicates emails and if no then hardly it happen to you in near future. Because if you found an estimate then in a day a normal Outlook user receives at least 30 – 80 messages a day
So here I am going to discuss why this duplicate email appears
There are lots of reasons for duplicates email messages in Outlook. For example you receive copies of same email from your teammates or friends that already exists in your inbox. Other reasons of duplicate emails are more technical and not so distinct. An incorrect synchronization with a device can also cause such problem. For e.g if you read a message on your system and mobile and then save read message to different folder on each device. Antivirus software can also generate duplicate e-mail, it won't do this consciously it while occurs when you click on send/receive button and all through often it start interfering with send/receive scheduled process.
Whatever the reason for a multiple copies of messages it causes a great confusion in your Outlook as well as fills the space of PST file
Problem Occurs due to Duplicate Email Messages
As you know Outlook is a most complex and resource full application of Microsoft Office suite. It requires lot of resources for swift performance, when you deal with a more email items, as it requires more disk space and consume CPU usage. Finally it reaches the point where existing resources do not avail and Outlook will slow down in performance. On an average PC Outlook starts to slow down when mailbox reaches 2-3 GB limit and if the size of Outlook data file not has been reduced then the Outlook start hanging and not responding.
How to Duplicate Emails in Outlook has been deleted
Microsoft suggests a way or a workaround to remove duplicates from Outlook manually. This process works only when you have only few dozen of Outlook emails but if you have several hundred messages the process become challenging for you or some time next to impossible if they are stored in different folders. So how a duplicate email has been deleted from Outlook? There are number of tool that helps in eliminating duplicates. Some of them are free and simple to execute. Other is sophisticated and flexible but they are paid.
Free way to remove Duplicates from Outlook folders
The one of the most popular free tool available free tool available in online market is Outlook Duplicate Items Remover it is also known as ODIR
The advantage of this tool rather than being free is easy user friendly interface, the first window of ODIR look likes:
As you seen in screenshot what all you have to do is, just select a folder to check or determine a duplicate and click on button "Remove duplicate items". Outlook duplicate items remover not only helps in searching duplicates emails but also helps in founding duplicates contacts, calendars, notes and tasks etc.
ODIR add-in actually does not delete the duplicates emails or items, it only lets you judge whether these are real duplicates. The ODIR plug-in generates a specific ODIR Duplicates files subfolder in selected folder and switch the duplicates into it and this also helps in using Outlook in a safer manner. If the ODIR folder does not contain any important message either delete it or zip the folder and move it to the flash drive or hard drive before deleting the duplicates just for the safer side.
Disadvantage
The main drawback of ODIR is lack of flexibility as it at a time it only found duplicate of one Outlook folder only not even search in subfolders of the same folder. So it being little bit irritated when you search for duplicates across all folders.
Note: Outlook Duplicate Item Remover has some limitation as it does not support Outlook 2013 yet.
How ODIR find duplicates in Outlook folders
The add-in checks the following properties of Outlook mail items and if they get matched, the email is treated as duplicate:
- Received emails – Internet message ID
- Sent emails – Subject and Time
- Unsent Email - Subject
First two Receive and Send emails does not raise any questions while there is some issue with draft folder so it's better to not use it over there.
(You can Download it from Here)
If you need a flexible tool than switch to a payable Outlook Duplicate Remover as it provides multiple option like:
- First off all before removing the duplicate it allows to view the status of PST file.
- Remove duplicate data in Batch.
- Remove duplicate within folder and across the folder.
- Remove duplicates from all Outlook items like emails, tasks, calendars, contacts and notes etc.
- After removing duplicates it allows you to restore it at the desired location.
- Most of all it support all version of Outlook like 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2013 (32 & 62 bit) versions.