Remove Duplicate Emails In Outlook For Mac 2011

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  3. How To Delete Duplicate Emails In Outlook

It’s probably one of the most annoying things; receiving the same e-mail multiple times. Actually, I’m not talking about just a single e-mail here but basically all your e-mails and not just twice but LOTS of times.

This article discusses the most common configuration issues which lead to e-mail duplication and how to prevent them from happening again.

Rules

A.pst file is the data file used by Outlook for Windows to archive your email messages, contacts, calendar items, tasks, and notes. Import the.pst file in order to transfer messages from a Windows-based computer to Outlook 2016 for Mac or Outlook 2019 for Mac. Outlook 2011 is the first Microsoft mail client for the Mac that gets close to the functionality of Microsoft Outlook for Windows. Now before all of you start arguing with that claim, I’m not saying that they are the same product. Outlook for Windows has more communications features than most people would even know what to do with. To remove duplicated email messages, please try another our product — Duplicate Email Remover. You can use this plug-in for Microsoft Outlook to find duplicates both in a single folder and in different folders. Any duplicate found can be: marked with a flag, deleted, copied or moved to any folder of your choice.

Rules, and more specific “Move to folder” rules, is the most easiest one to get yourself some duplicates. This is because for each e-mail received, Outlook will fire all configured rules against it. The following example will show how this can lead to duplicates.

In this example there are two rules configured;

  1. Apply this rule after the message arrives
    from Robert Sparnaaij
    move it to the Outlook folder
  2. Apply this rule after the message arrives
    with Outlook in the subject
    move it to the Outlook folder

Remove Duplicate Emails In Outlook For Mac 2011 Keeps Asking For Password

Now imagine that you receive an e-mail from me where I have the word Outlook in the subject; both rules with apply! So it will get moved out of the Inbox two times and thus create a duplicate.

The way to prevent this, is to add the action “stop processing more rules” to the rule. If we would add that action to the first rule and the rule applies to a received message, the action “stop processing more rules” will prevent that the second rule will be executed as well.

Keep in mind that if you have even more rules configured that should always trigger – for instance that assigns messages to a category or marks it for follow up – you’ll need to sort your rules in the correct order as well.

Also note that the “stop processing more rules” would only affect the current message that is being checked. When you’ve received multiple emails, all those emails will be verified starting with the first rule again.

Multiple Accounts

When you configure multiple accounts in Outlook, make sure that these are indeed separate accounts and not just aliases for the same mailbox.

In the case of an alias, you would basically have the same account configured twice as all emails from either alias is being received in the same mailbox. The incredible machine mac os x download.

When you also have the option configured to leave a copy on the server (POP3 account), both accounts will collect the same e-mail leaving you with duplicates. To read up on the difference between a separate mailbox and aliases see: About mailboxes, addresses and aliases.

To prevent duplicates from alias accounts (other than removing them), you must configure the alias account not to receive e-mails since they are already being received by the original account;

  • Outlook 2007
    Tools-> Options-> tab: Mail Setup-> button: Send/Receive-> button: Edit…-> select the alias account-> uncheck: Receive mail items
  • Outlook 2010 / 2013 / 2016 / 2019 / Office 365
    File-> Options->Advanced-> button: Send/Receive-> button: Edit…-> select the alias account-> uncheck: Receive mail items

You’d then still be able to select with which address you send out your emails.

Profile Recreation

When you recreate your mail profile – for instance when the original got corrupted or when you reinstalled your PC and configure Outlook for the first time again – and you originally had Outlook configured to leave a copy on the server (POP3 account), it will collect all the e-mails from the server again even when you have received them in a previous configuration.

This happens because the newly created profile doesn’t “know” that these messages have been received before by another profile.

For Outlook 2007, this means that when you recreate your mail profile and, during setup, you immediately configure it to use your old pst-file as the default delivery location, it will create duplicates for the messages that are already received and that are still on-line as well.

To prevent this from happening, make sure to start Outlook at least once with a clean pst-file before reconnecting the old one and setting it as the default delivery location. This way you’ll collect all the e-mails in a new pst-file.

When you are using Outlook 2010 or later, you can prevent this by reconnecting your original pst-file during the POP3 account configuration.

Outlook 2007

  1. Connect to your original pst-file by File-> Open-> Outlook Data File… and once opened move all the newly received e-mails to that pst-file.
  2. Close Outlook and go to Control Panel-> Mail-> E-mail Accounts-> tab Data Files. Select the the original pst-file and press Set as Default
  3. Select the other pst-file and press Remove.If you want to keep your computer clean press the Settings button first and write down the location of the pst-file so you can physically delete the file as well and not just the connection to it.

Outlook 2010 / 2013 / 2016 / 2019 / Office 365
Outlook 2010 and later do remember which emails have been downloaded before as it stores this information in the pst-file itself.

Upon configuring your account, you can specify the delivery location to an already existing pst-file instead of letting Outlook create a new one for you. If you have retrieved your account settings via AutoDiscover, you can select the option to manually configure your account. This will get you to a screen where the account settings retrieved via AutoDiscover are shown and also has a section “Deliver new message to” to select your original pst-file.

To change the delivery pst-file for your account after you have configured your account use;

  • File-> Account Settings-> Account Settings-> select your e-mail account-> button Change Folder-> select New Outlook Data File… and browse to your original pst-file.

Synchronization Tools

Synchronization Tools are great to keep your contacts you have in Outlook and on your mobile device, like a tablet or smartphone, synchronized and up-to-date. Depending on the tool you are using, synchronizing for the first time might be tricky and could cause some duplicates or “similar” items.

For instance, I used to store most of my mobile phone contacts by first name only and the ones in Outlook by their full name. So I had a contact named Edwin on my mobile phone and a contact named Edwin Sparnaaij (yep, trying to get my brother famous here :-D) in Outlook. When I would synchronize, I would end up with an item named Edwin and an item named Edwin Sparnaaij in both Outlook and my mobile phone since the synch tool doesn’t know these are one and the same person in real life.

To prevent this from happening, make sure your contacts are in order before synchronizing for the first time or you’ll only duplicate the mess. Since my mobile phone was a big mess mainly because of the lack of a proper input device and contact storage properties on it (I had a Nokia 3210 at that time) getting things in order would be handier in Outlook. To make sure it doesn’t mix with your original Outlook contacts you can create a new mail profile first with a dummy account or no account configured at all (tip: call the profile Mobile Device so you can easily recognize it). Now you can safely synchronize with that mail profile and use Outlook to easily clean up your contacts on your mobile.

If you are a control freak (I won’t be last to admit this) and want to make sure that the initial synchronization indeed doesn’t create any duplicates, move the cleaned up contacts from the Mobile Device mail profile to your original one;

  1. Start Outlook with your original mail profile.
  2. Connect to the pst-file from the Mobile Device profile by File-> Open-> Outlook Data File…
  3. Move the Contacts from the Mobile Device pst-file to your original Contacts folder.

Outlook Duplicate Email

Now that you have created a “master copy” in Outlook make a back-up of your pst-file in case synchronization goes wrongafter all. Also now that we have all contacts correctly in Outlook, we don’t want it to still end up creating duplicates because the synchronization tool isn’t “intelligent” enough to recognize the similar items (this depends on the synchronization tool you are using so I’m going for a fail safe here). As we have a master copy in Outlook we can safely delete all the contacts on the mobile device. Now reconfigure your synchronization tool to use your original mail profile and synchronize; there is just NO WAY you can end up with duplicates now!

Virus scanner / Firewall

Another quite common evil which will end up creating duplicates is having a virus scanner which integrates itself with Outlook or a too strictly configured firewall. To understand this, I’ll explain a little bit how the e-mails are actually being received without a virus scanner or firewall;

When Outlook does a Send/Receive it will make a connection with the mail server and will ask the server which e-mails it is currently storing. The mail server will respond with a list and Outlook will verify with its local list if it has collected all the e-mails already. If so; Outlook will close the connection to the mail server. If not; Outlook will request the new e-mails from the server and when it has received all the e-mails, it will close the connection with the mail server and update its own list of received e-mails.

The above illustrates a perfect Send/Receive cycle. If for some reason the connection gets terminated unexpectedly so that Outlook cannot properly close the connection to the mail server, Outlook will consider it as a failed Send/Receive cycle and will not update its own list of received e-mails, even when some or all of them have been received already. This means that at the next Send/Receive interval, Outlook will check for new e-mails with an “outdated” list and collects the e-mails from the previous Send/Receive interval again and will not update its local list until the connection to the mail server closes properly.

This is where the virus scanner and firewall come into the picture. The exact method depends a bit on the virus scanner solution chosen but basically when a virus scanner integrates with Outlook it will “intercept” the Send/Receive request from Outlook. So when Outlook does a Send/Receive and “thinks” it is talking to a mail server it is in fact talking to the virus scanner. This means that now the virus scanner is responsible for the connection. This means setting up the connection, requesting the list of mails stored on the server, managing the timeouts, etc… but also closing the connection properly and telling this to Outlook.

Although this could go right of course many many times, keep in mind that you do have added a new point of failure to the Send/Receive process. This leaves you with another possibility that the connection to the mail server isn’t closed properly and already received e-mail being received again at the next Send/Receive interval.

2011

Therefore, and for various other reasons as well, it is another good reason to prevent your virus scan solution to integrate with Outlook. There is no direct need to integrate a virus scanner with Outlook as it is redundant anyway; it won’t add another level of security since it is one and the same tool as your on-access-scanner. Default Outlook security settings and an up-to-date virus scanner are enough to keep you safe! See the documentation of your virus scanner on how to disable its integration with Outlook. Also see: Disable virus scanner integration?

Now that you know how the Send/Receive interval works, you can imagine that a too strictly configured firewall could terminate the connection prematurely as well. In this case, check/disable your firewall and wait two Send/Receive intervals. If the second one doesn’t cause any duplicates, you’ll know that your firewall isn’t properly configured. See the documentation of your firewall software on how to configure your firewall for e-mail retrieval with Outlook.

Tools to clean up the mess

If you are just swamped with duplicates, you probably don’t want to clean up the mess manually. The ideal and easiest way to recover would be by restoring a back-up. If you don’t have a current back-up, there is a wide range of duplicate remover tools to choose from.

Sperry Software (discount code “BH93RF24”)

MAPILab (discount code “4PM76A8”)

MS Outlook keeps all sent and received email messages in a single PST file. Outlook users do not bother about the space that this data occupies on the disk. An email message typically comprises the stylized text along with any attachments and background images. Moreover, you may have some redundant data (i.e. duplicate emails) in your ‘Inbox’ and other mail folders. Consequently, the size of your PST grows eventually and when it crosses a predefined size limit, it becomes susceptible to corruption. Before we go into details about the solution for duplicate remover, let’s go through the reasons behind duplicate emails.

Why you are facing the issue of Duplicate Emails in Outlook:

Synchronization Issue: While performing synchronization with any of our electronic devices (Mobile, Laptops, and Computer) or with server sometime user will not be able to create suitable connections. Because of this user faces duplicate emails via their senders (business emails, promotional emails) and this gives rise to email duplicity.

Server Connectivity: Most of the user forgot to disable the checkbox labelled as “Leave Messages on the Server”. This option creates more duplicity in Outlook email box as the user receives a copy of emails in their mailboxes. The user must disable this option to avoid email duplicity issue.

Outlook Rules: It’s true Outlook has more advanced and excellent features that prove to be very productive for Outlook users. From the bundle of vast features, one of the dependable features is a creation of ‘Outlook Rule’. While creation rule user most of the time make an incorrect configuration that outcomes in duplicate emails.

Antivirus Installation: For security reasons, we install antiviruses in our machine to secure data from being lost. We are not aware of fact that antiviruses also make Outlook emails duplicate. A user must disable their antivirus while using Outlook.

Solutions to Resolve the Issue of Duplicate Emails

To resolve the issue of duplicate Outlook emails there is two methods available i.e. Manual and Automatic Method. Both approaches have their pros and cons mentioned below. Let go through these methods one after another:

Manual method to delete Outlook Duplicate Emails:

To start the process selects all the emails or folders which need to be removed.

  • Point to Ribboned Interface select option table view
  • In Field Chooser list option select all the fields
  • Move the selected items to the table heading.
  • Sort the items and chose for option Modifying heading because some items have unique data.
  • Using “Shift key” to select the item set first and last.
  • Click on delete button to remove selected items permanently.

Drawbacks of manual method

The manual process is pertinent to a particular version of Outlook and moreover using manual method will never guarantee the user for complete and successful recovery of data. There is an absolute risk of data loss. To avoid such issue shrewder tactic is the automatic method.

How To Delete Duplicate Emails In Outlook

Automated Method: Automated method is the use of professional Outlook Duplicate Remover toollike Stellar Deduplicator for Outlook. This approach is considered as the most easy and flexible way to search for duplicates in your various Outlook mail folders. Using Outlook Duplicate Remover tool user can perform a personalized action on these duplicate and enjoy error-free services of Outlook.