How to Remove Duplicate Emails in Microsoft Outlook

If you download emails from POP3 accounts or synchronize Outlook with your phone, you would have faced a problem of too many duplicate emails in your Inbox. It is rather tedious and takes lot of time finding and deleting duplicate email messages manually.

Unfortunately, Microsoft Outlook doesn’t provide any built-in feature to help your find and remove duplicate email messages from one or several Outlook folders.

How to Delete Duplicate Outlook Mails

Use the following steps to delete duplicate email messages in Outlook:

1. Launch Outlook and in the View menu, point to Current View, and then click to change the folder view to a table type view. Choose Inbox-Messages
2. Right-click a column heading, click Field Chooser.
3. From the list at the top of the Field Chooser, click to select the All item name fields.
4. Drag the Modified field to the table heading.
5. Verify that the duplicate items have a unique date from the original set of items. If it is unique, click the Modified heading so that the items are sorted by this field.
6. Click the first item in the set that you want to delete, scroll to the last item in the set that you want to delete, and then click the last item while you hold down the SHIFT key.
7. Press DELETE to permanently delete all selected items.

When you import items into Microsoft Outlook and you add the contact as a duplicate, or if duplicate detection is turned off, there is not an option to remove duplicate items after you import. The above trick explains the method to delete duplicate items after you complete the import process.

While searching for tools to delete duplicate emails from Outlooks, I also stumbled upon a completely free tool called Outlook Duplicates Remover that does exactly what it is supposed to do - it removes duplicate items from Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, Notes, and mail folders in Microsoft Outlook. It’s no longer free though.