Outlook 2002 SP3
Windows XP Pro

I need to write a Macro to deal with a "hypothetical" email issue.

Suppose somebody hands you a computer and says "Clean up my email, please."
You start the computer, open up Outlook and take a look around. Everything
looks normal as normal can be. Then you go to where the email has been
backed up/archived, and you find 5 or 6 pst folders containing god knows
what, and each pst file is at least 500 MB in size. At this point, my
thinking is that it sure would be nice if I could write a script that will
combine the email from all of these pst files into a single pst file with
all duplicates removed.

Is this possible? Is the functionality already in Outlook?

I use Outlook solely for email purposes, but I don't recall there being the
ability in Outlook to weed out duplicate emails.

I had thought of loading the smallest pst file into Outlook, manually
deleting the dups, then use that file to export the email from the other pst
files into, making sure to select the "do not export duplicate mail" option
when I do so. The only problem with that is that I end up with all the
funky folders which I'd rather not have.

Also, just for my own edification, how difficult or easy would it be to
write a Macro that will make a copy of every single email item and place
them in a empty folder of my choosing within that pst file? The reason I
ask is that some of these pst files have 30 to 40 folders with email in
them, and I'm just trying to get them all in one place.

Any and all help and suggestions appreciated. Thanks!

-gk-


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"The creative act is not the province of remote oracles or rarefied
geniuses but a transparent process that is open to everyone."
-Greg Kot in Wilco Learning How To Die-

A quick search returned these hits
http://tinyurl.com/abwk9
http://www.sperrysoftware.com/Outloo...Eliminator.asp
Unfortunately both the free script and the buyware assume you have all
of your mail items in the same folder.

I'd think you could do this by checking for duplicate
ConversationIndex values, which you can do with items in different
folders and even different PST's. That might involve the brute-force
method of creating a database of all ConversationIndex values and then
reporting on where the duplicates are so that you can choose which
ones to delete.

I'd write this but I'd have to sell it for about $25 per copy, sorry.