How To Remove Duplicates In Outlook 2016 For Mac

15-09-2021
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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?

Tips-If have several Outlook emails and want to merge and remove duplicate emails in Outlook 2016, 2013, 2010, 2007 and all below editions, you can use Merge PST Files software. This tool helps you to combine Outlook emails, contacts, calendars without duplicates. Once the import is completed, you cannot remove duplicate items easily. Focus on the phrase “you cannot remove duplicate items easily.” This means – you can remove the duplicate items, but not easily. To help you remove duplicate items in Microsoft Outlook 2016, 2019 and in all previous versions, go through this entire post meticulously. How to remove your Outlook duplicates ‘NoMoreDupes for Outlook’ is an Outlook add-in to remove Outlook duplicates. Not only contacts or emails are supported. All items of Outlook are supported by this Outlook duplicate remover. You can even search across folders. Perhaps you have the same contact in different folders?

To remove duplicate contacts on your Mac, first launch the Contacts app, which is located in your Dock by default. If you can’t find it, check the Applications folder or search for Contacts via Spotlight. The Contacts app has a couple of menu options that will help you clean up your duplicate contact entries. Click on the Calendar at the top View - Change View - List Select the Holiday on the List then right click on the event and select Delete or hit the Delete button on the keyboard Note: You can delete multiple events by holding down the Ctrl button on the keyboard.

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

Left

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.

How To Remove Duplicates In Outlook 2016 For Mac Database

Hope it helps!

Let’s look at an issue with Outlook user facing Duplicate Folders in Outlook.

Issue Description:

Duplicate folders in your Microsoft Exchange Server mailbox when view the Outlook folder list.

1st Troubleshooting that can solve the issue:

Check OWA if the issue not present; so try to recreate the Outlook profile.

Resolution:

The issue is caused by a mobile device or a third-party server application that synchronizes with the Exchange Server mailbox may unexpectedly introduce the duplication and it will be resolved by providing and instructing the customer to perform the steps outlined below.

  • Exit Outlook and close OWA on all workstations that are connected to the user mailbox.
  • Use MFCMapi to identify the duplicate folders. To do this, follow these steps:
  • Download MFCMAPI from http://mfcmapi.codeplex.com
  • Run MFCMAPI.exe.
  • Click on the Tools menu, then click Options.
  • Click to enable the following option:
  • Use MDB_ONLINE when calling OpenMsgStore
  • Click OK.
  • On the Session menu, click Logon.
  • If you are prompted for a profile, select your profile name, and then click OK.
  • In the top pane, locate the line that corresponds to your mailbox, and double-click it.
  • In the navigation pane (left-side pane), expand Root Container, and then expand Top of Information Store.
  • To identify the duplicate folder, click one of the duplicate folders on the left pane. In the right pane, locate the Value column for the PR_CREATION_TIME property. Compare this value to the duplicate folder with the same name. The duplicate folder will have a newer creation date and time. Work with one pair of folders at a time (for example, start with the two Calendar folders that appear).
  • Use MFCMAPI to copy any items from the duplicate folder to the original folder. These are items created after the duplicate folders were created. This can include email that was received in the Inbox, Contacts that were created, Calendar appointments that you scheduled and meetings that you accepted, follow these steps:
  • In the left pane of MFCMAPI, double-click on the duplicate folder, which has the newer creation date and time.
  • On the window that opens, click on the top pane, then press CTRL + A to select all items.
    If no items appear in the top pane, the folder is already empty; skip to step 7.
  • Click on the Actions menu, then click the Copy Messages command.
  • Close the folder window, then double-click on the original folder, which has the older creation date and time.
  • Click on the Actions menu, then click the Paste Messages command.
  • Click to enable the MESSAGE_MOVE checkbox, then click OK.
  • Close the folder window.
  • In MFCMAPI, switch back to the duplicate folder, which is now empty. Use MFCMAPI to delete it.
  • Right-click the duplicate folder, and then select Delete Folder.
  • Click to enable the Hard Deletion option, and then click OK.

Repeat steps 2 through 4 for other common Outlook folders (Contacts, Deleted Items, Drafts, Inbox, Journal, Junk E-mail, Notes, Sent Items, and Tasks).

Close MFCMAPI.

How Do I Delete Duplicate Emails In Outlook 2016 For Mac

Press WinKey+R to bring up the Run dialog box then input “C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice12OUTLOOK.EXE” followed by a space and then the switch /resetfolders as below:

“C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice12OUTLOOK.EXE /resetfolders ”

How To Remove Duplicates In Outlook 2016 For Mac Osx

2016

Ratish Nair

Microsoft MVP | Office Servers and Services

Team @MSExchangeGuru

How To Remove Duplicate Emails In Outlook 2016 For Mac