Outlook 2003 migration causing duplicate mails

[David DeRolph]

I'm copying a question posted in an online computing forum:

"I pay for a POP3 email account and use Outlook 2003 to access it. Outlook
is configured to leave a copy of the messages on the server until they are
deleted.

I have backed up my .pst file on this machine and need to migrate to a new
computer. When I use my current .pst file on the new machine many duplicate
mail messages are received from the server.

Any emails that I have currently in my .pst file are not detected as being
there, and are simply downloaded again from the server. This creates one
big mess.

How can I get around this happening please? There must be something that I
am not backing up, as Outlook on this machine clearly knows which messages
its needs to download, and which ones it does not."

 

[Brian Tillman]

I'm copying a question posted in an online computing forum:

"I pay for a POP3 email account and use Outlook 2003 to access it.
Outlook is configured to leave a copy of the messages on the server
until they are deleted.

I have backed up my .pst file on this machine and need to migrate to
a new computer. When I use my current .pst file on the new machine
many duplicate mail messages are received from the server.

Any emails that I have currently in my .pst file are not detected as
being there, and are simply downloaded again from the server. This
creates one big mess.

How can I get around this happening please? There must be something
that I am not backing up, as Outlook on this machine clearly knows
which messages its needs to download, and which ones it does not."

The reason why mesages are downloaded again is because the information on
which messages have been downloaded already is not kept in the PST, but in
the mail profile in the registry. Moving the PST from one machine to the
other cannot synchronize that informaiton. There are several approaches.

One (and the best, in my opinion) is to disable the option of leaving
messages on the server. If you must leave them there, for whatever reason,
then the next best solution is to use a web interface to the server mailbox
and move them to a folder other than the Inbox on the server, if your server
allows you to create alternate folders on the server that way (most do). If
the messages aren't in the Inbox, Outlook won't see them.

Another approach is to create a new PST, make it the delivery location,
allow all the messages to download into that PST, then switch the delivery
location back to the original PST, closing the added one and, thereby,
removing the duplicates all in one go. From that point on, Outlook will
know what is has downloaded already.

A third alternative is to just let all the messages download again and
acquire a duplicate remover. See
http://www.slipstick.com/addins/mail_duplicates.asp . At least one of the
duplicate removers there is free.