Delete duplicates from multiple PST files?

[Dawn]

So I am wondering if there is might be a not-horrifically-painful way to
delete duplicate emails now contained in PST archive files.

For various reasons, I've ended up with multiple PST files as outlook
archives, these emails have been copied from other people in an attempt to
make a complete "archive" on a particular client in our office. So, for
instance, if a particular email went to me, to co-worker A and co-worker B,
when we scraped together emails from all three sources, I've now ended up
with three copies of the exact same email.

Works fine in terms of making sure I have access to the historical email
record that I need, except the PSTs are quite large, and it seems this may be
an issue with file stability (they seem to pick up errors after a while,
which we have been able to repair with running scanpst. The file size may
have nothing to do with this, but it's a suspicion.)

I suspect removing the duplicates is not a simple thing to do, but just in
case I have overlooked something obvious, thought I'd ask. We have Outlook
2007, if that makes any difference. The PSTs range from 40MB up to 19GB.

Thanks!

 

[Roady [MVP]]

Easiest would be to use a duplicates remover.
See http://www.howto-outlook.com/tag/duplicate-removers

19GB is very large. Just curious; how is the performance? I hope you do not
connect to them on a network share ;-)

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

There are duplicate remover tools but AFAIK the mail needs to be in one pst,
possibly the same folder.
See http://www.slipstick.com/addins/mail_duplicates.asp for tools.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]



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[Dawn]

Thanks -- I suspect no one here (myself included) will be willing to trust a
third party program to do this. Well, at least now I can stop thinking maybe
there is some easy way this could be done.

As you suspect, performance is fine when the PST is local, but terrible if
put onto the network. (of course, I think this is true for smaller PSTs as
well, we seem to have network issues. Which is way above my pay grade, and a
subject for a different post.)

Thank you!

 

[Roady [MVP]]

You're welcome!
Well, the 3rd party app from MAPILab (and many others) will show you which
duplicates they have found and then you can evaluate it before deleting
items. Keeping a backup makes it easy to undo the action in case you still
detect an issue afterwards.

You really shouldn't connect to a pst-file on a network share. It is not
supported nor recommended by Microsoft as it could lead to data corruption
or even data loss. I suspected already that you were trying to connect to it
from a network share, which is why I asked ;-) Keeping the file locally and
making frequent backups to a network share is recommended.