As MS Outlook is commonly used as a professional email platform by several organizations, employees exchange email messages for their daily work updates. The mail flow in the organization often involves a lot of email duplicates & attachments as the messages from external & internal senders are forwarded to colleagues, bosses, and relevant departments. The duplicate emails and items in the MS Outlook increase the size of its database, as a result, duplicate items slow down the overall Outlook performance.
In this article, I will be discussing a method on how to remove duplicate attachments and Mails associated with Microsoft Outlook.
Also, Read – Outlook Vs Lotus Notes
Contents
Need for Replica Removal in Outlook
When the employee receives an email, which should have been addressed to a different employee of the same organization, he/she will forward the email without further delay. It will create at least two copies of the emails or attachments (if present) in the mailbox. Attached files will be dragged with the emails irrespective of their size, file type, etc. In situations like this are repeated, the database will contain lots of identical files or emails. Therefore to reduce the mailbox size and to improve the MS Outlook performance, we need to remove duplicate emails from Outlook along with its attachments.
How to Delete Duplicate Attachments in Outlook
● Deleting Duplicates from the Attachments Line
- Start Outlook and open the message having duplicate attachments or messages received with duplicates.
- Now, navigate to the attachments located under the headers, next to the message icon.
- Check them and right-click the attachment.
- In the Menu bar, click on ‘Remove attachment’. Verify this process by clicking on ‘Remove Attachment’ from the pop-up window.
● Deleting Duplicate Attachments in the body of an Email
- Open the Email message containing duplicate attachments. Afterward, find the message that contains duplicate items or you want to remove.
- Click on the attachment to highlight it. After selecting the attachment, a dotted line will appear.
- Navigate to Move menu at the top menu and select ‘Actions’. Click on ‘Edit Message’ from the drop-down box. Press the ‘Delete’ key on the keyboard to delete the duplicate attachment.
How to Remove Duplicate Emails in Outlook?
- Launch Outlook and navigate to Current view on View Menu, now change the folder view to a table type view.
- In Outlook 2003, Go to Arrange By on the View menu and point to the Current View changing folder view to a table type view.
- In Outlook 2010, select the folder from which you want to delete duplicate items and perform the same steps as above.
- Right-click a column heading & click Field Chooser.
- Click to select All <item name> fields from the list at top of the Field Chooser
- Drag the Modified field to the table heading
- Before moving towards ensuring that the duplicate items have a different date from the original set of items. If it is different, then click the Modified heading to sort the items by this field.
- Select the first item that you want to delete to the last item while you hold down the SHIFT
- Press on DELETE to delete all the selected items permanently.
Drawbacks Related to Manual Methods
These above-mentioned methods of deleting duplicate emails may not work in all the versions of MS Outlook and consume lots of unnecessary time. Also, there is more limitation of these methods, some of them are listed below:
- The process is lengthy and time-consuming.
- A Novice user may find difficulty in performing them.
- If a user does not perform them correctly then there may be a chance of data-alteration.
Conclusion
In the blog, we have discussed the issue of increasing mailbox size in the Outlook profile due to the presence of duplicate data items. The manual method on how a user can remove the duplicate emails and attachments has been described.