Applies to: Office 2019, 2016, 365. Windows 7, 8, 10 and macOS (with small adjustments).

Have you ever got a bunch of redundant duplicated email items, contact persons and calendar entries in Outlook and wanted to quickly clean up these annoying duplicates so you can focus on the real stuff?

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. Duplicate Emails In Outlook free download - Duplicate Checker, Duplicate File Finder, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, and many more programs. Create a new identity in Office for Mac 2011 and rebuild Outlook data base and verify the status. Follow the steps below to create a new identity: 1. Make sure Outlook 2011 for Mac is closed. Click on Applications and then on Microsoft Office 2011 folder. Click on the Office folder. Open the Microsoft Database Utility. To remove duplicate emails in Outlook 2016, 2013, 2010, 2007, 2003 and below versions, just follow the above steps in order to avoid redundancy issues that occur in MS Outlook. However, these manual procedures will be only applicable for smaller sized PST file. Recently, when I send an email via a Gmail IMAP account in Microsoft Outlook, double sent email copies are saved in the Sent Items folder automatically. I search for some reference and finally get a method to fix it. Here I will share the method to prevent duplicate sent items for Gmail IMAP account in Microsoft Outlook 2010 and 2013.

If so, keep reading, because today we’ll show you how to you can stop receiving those messages and remove duplicated email from your mailbox without purchasing a costly remover tool.

We’ll first explain the most prevalent reasons for the most common email duplication cases. We’ll then provide some simple solutions that you can easily implement to cleanup redundant conversations, contacts and meetings from your email inbox with ease.

Reasons for duplicate email in your mailbox

From what i have seen in the past, Outlook duplicates typically origin from six main reasons:

1. Rules not configured correctly: There might be cases that two or more rules are fired upon receiving email, resulting in multiple instances of the same messages.
2. Incorrect account setup: In several cases, i have seen that users mistakenly defined multiple occurrences of the same email account and this results in multiple instances of each incoming email, contacts and calendar entries.
3. Send / receive interval are too short. If the frequency of your inbox update is too short; Outlook might load the message into your inbox, BUT might not be able to mark messages occurrences as synchronized/loaded. This results in multiplied occurrences of the same messages.
4. Synchronization issues: We have also observed duplicated contacts and messages resulting from sync problems with 3rd party providers.
5. User errors while manually copying and pasting meetings and appointments in the Outlook Calendar.
6. Incorrect merging of several Outlook personal folders (also referred as PST files) into one folder.

Impact of duplicated Outlook items

1. They harm your productivity.
2. They confuse and cause errors. Just imagine replying more than once to the same note :-(…
3. They might impact your Outlook client loading performance. The more messages stored on your computer or server Outlook will need to load on startup, the slower its performance will be.
4. Dups fill up your inbox. Business users will need to delete email to to comply with the allocated email storage capacity provided by their IT department.

Now that we understand the root causes and impact, let’s focus on some possible solutions.

Remove duplicate email in Outlook

There are several email duplication removing utilities and add-ins in the market, but we do believe and recommend that you use the out of the box Outlook functionality. Read on for the complete procedure.

• Open Microsoft Outlook (this process will work in versions 2013 and 2016).
• It’s always advisable to backup your email before executing a clean up procedure. Here’s a step by step procedure to export and backup your Outlook email, calendar and contacts.
• After you are done, select the folder in which the duplicate emails are.
• Under Home, go ahead and select the Clean up drop down box in the Ribbon.

• Select Clean up conversation to delete and move duplicate emails in the conversation to the Deleted Items folder.
• Clean up folder will delete and move duplicate emails in the specific folder to the Deleted Items.
• Clean up folder and sub folders will allow you to clean up also subfolders.
• Once done, you might right click on the Deleted Items folder and hit Empty Folder to delete your duplicated email instances for good.

Note: If you are a Microsoft Office for MAC user, you will find the Clean Up option in your Home Ribbon.

Preventing Email duplication issues

1. If relevant, check on your Outlook rules to ensure that multiple rules are not firing in parallel for each incoming message.
2. If using 3rd party web email providers, Check that your GMail, Yahoo and Outlook.com accounts are correctly defined in Outlook.
3. Now, increase the frequency of your inbox update. Here’s the step by step process:
   • In Outlook, hit Send / Receive
   • Hit Send / Receive Groups
   • Now go ahead and select Define Send / Receive Groups
   • Now set the time interval to a value between 15 and 30 minutes (See screenshot below)
   • Click OK.

Cleaning up duplicated contacts

If you have found duplicated contact people in your People tab, you will find this tutorial very useful to remove the redundant contacts. Follow the outlined steps to merge duplicated entries in your Outlook contact list.

Hope it helps!

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1 Comment · Posted by Bogdan in Email & Outlook

Tags: duplicate emails · duplicate reason · fix for duplicates · remove duplicates Outlook

One morning, you sit down in front of your PC, take a sip of coffee and, as usual, launch Outlook for another fun-filled day of answering emails. Only this time, when you look in your Inbox, you find it filled with duplicates upon duplicates of emails, all having the same subject, timestamp and so on…

Why were those duplicates generated?

This scenario, unfortunately, isn’t that rare and it can pose a real nuisance since you have to search and diagnose the source of the duplicates, then find a fix for it and lastly, clean up your Inbox… well, you can leave them alone and just get on with work, but those emails will take up space and if the problem persists then in the long run they will slow down Outlook, your email server and lead to more complex issues.

In order to help you out, we have collected a couple of reasons why this email behavior happens as well as their respective fixes.

Duplicate email #1 – a message on the server is corrupt, and thus generates duplicates when Outlook starts its Send/Receive process. In order to fix this, you or your IT administrator will have to log in to the email server and delete the corrupt/damaged email that is creating all the duplicates;

Duplicate email #2 – after you have synchronized your Outlook profile with your phone/tablet, something went wrong – the result is the last batch of emails are present twice on your PC. You can’t actually fix this, only manually delete those duplicates and hope that it won’t happen again.

Duplicate email #3 – the “Leave a copy of the messages on the server” box has been checked on your account settings and Outlook creates duplicate emails at each Send/Receive. The fix is to uncheck that option (you can find it under Account Settings -> More Settings -> Advanced).

Duplicate email #4 – you can define rules in Outlook that generate duplicates, for example:

Rule 1: move messages from contact X to folder Y

Rule 2: move messages that contain WORD in the subject line to folder Z

Now, if, you receive a message from contact X, that also contains WORD in the subject line then you will have the same email in folder Y and in Z. You have to make the appropriate changes to your rules set-up and sift through all your folders to delete those duplicate emails.

Duplicate email #5 – if you import emails from different Outlook data files (PSTs or OSTs) in your current Outlook profile, then the emails that are both in your current file and in the one you import will be displayed. Of course, if the same emails are present in both data files you will see duplicates. This is especially true for large data files, that hold years of work and the only way to go about it is to search and delete each duplicate manually (yes… a daunting task, but one that needs doing);

Duplicate email #6 – if the email server or Outlook fails to respond during a Send/Receive, then the next sync will download the previous emails again. Yes, manually deleting those duplicates is the only thing you can do.

Duplicate email #7 – if you have more than one alias defined for the same email account in your Outlook profile, you will receive the same email on each alias (you will see as many duplicates as you have aliases). To fix this, use only one alias/email account and delete those duplicate emails.

Duplicate email #8 – on an IMAP account, if you have set-up Outlook to retrieve new emails automatically upon startup and open the Inbox automatically you will see each message is duplicated. If you have only one account defined, then uncheck the option to perform a Send/Receive at startup, if you have more accounts defined uncheck the option to go directly to Inbox at startup.

Duplicate email #9 – if you forward your emails from one PC to another then the forwarding rule can create loops where messages are continually bounced back and forth between them, creating an infinite number of duplicates. You will have to change your rule accordingly (just test different configurations out).

Duplicate email #10 – duplicate emails can be also caused if you subscribe multiple times to a mailing list. In this case you will just have to contact the persons that send you the emails and inform them of your issue.

Duplicate email #11 – if you are having network or server problems, or your computer is really slow, then at one time or another you will surely come across duplicate emails. This is because most of the systems employed are conservative (if the server doesn’t know for a fact that you received the email, it will send it again… and again… just to make sure). There is actually no quick fix for this – if you are running your own email server then contact your IT administrator; else, you will have to wait for the network problems to be resolved.

In the end, you’re still left manually deleting duplicates and having to sift through all your email folders, like in a cat and mouse game… yes, it can be done by hand but what if you later find that you deleted a message which only looked like a duplicate by mistake? To make things easier, there are many free programs available that remove duplicate emails, but after a quick glance you’ll notice that most aren’t compatible with the latest versions of Outlook, or haven’t been updated in some years and so on. For your peace of mind we have developed Weight Diet for Outlook, our add-in that hyper-charges your Outlook’s speed and performance. Not only can you delete duplicate emails easily but also find and erase obsolete ones (autoresponder notifications, out-of-office and so on), compress your PST file, move your email attachments to your hard-drive (so Outlook doesn’t have to load them every time) and send email attachments to the cloud (your recipients will receive a link from where to download, so bandwidth use will be at a minimum).

All of these features that help you day-in and day-out are available when you purchase a license for Weight Diet, which only costs $29.95 (30 day money-back guarantee). So, just go here to purchase a lifetime license or give it a try by installing the trial version from here. You’ll be amazed at how you managed to work all that time with Outlook crawling at snail’s speed!

If you have ever sent out an email newsletter, I’m sure that with each passing campaign you encountered people who opted out of your email list. Have you ever asked yourself why? Read more: Why do people unsubscribe to emails? | 1 Comment

The subject line in an email, almost as much as the from line, is one of the most important deal-breakers for your readers. That’s why this week we looked at how different email clients (on all platforms we could get our hands on) dealt with them… So, continue reading and see for yourself how many characters your subject line should have! Read more: The maximum displayed length of the email subject line | 1 Comment

In last week’s article, we hoped to convince you that the from line is at least as important as the subject line in all your email communications. Now, to help you out, we tested different platforms and came up with the following “cheat-sheet”, detailing the maximum displayed length of the from line on different browsers, phones and desktop applications! Read more: The maximum displayed length of the email from line | 2 Comments

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