How To Remove Duplicate Emails In Outlook Accounts

An Introduction to the Issue Of Duplicate Emails in Outlook

Communication over the Internet involves billions of emails being sent and received every second to users located at geographically same or different places on the globe. Users have a lot on their plate in the form of multiple email accounts and their respective sub folders. Microsoft Outlook has helped reduce the complexity of email service by giving users a clear and concise interface for handling their different email accounts. Despite this, some errors are still looming at large in this wonderful email client application. One such mind-boggling scenario is that of the user receiving duplicate emails in Outlook having more than one account configured with the client.

Also, Read: Migrate from Apple Mail to Outlook

You may at times ask yourself: “Why am I getting duplicate emails in Microsoft Outlook?”

The causes for receiving duplicate emails in Outlook can be numerous. We will explore each one by one in the section below and try to give possible solutions for each. Check if the causes mentioned below match with yours and implement the given remedial method specified for it to solve the query on how to stop receiving duplicate emails in Outlook 2016, 2013, 2010, 2007 versions.

Cause #1: Network Issues

If you are facing network or server related problems, or the processing speed of your computer is really slow, then you will experience the problem of receiving duplicate emails in Microsoft Outlook. This is due to the reason that the server systems are designed in a “conventional fashion”. When the server does not get an acknowledgment receipt it continues to send the same email over and over again.

Remedy:

If you are using your own server then contact your server administrator for changing the settings. Otherwise, it is recommended to use a system equipped with higher computational capability.

Cause #2 Importing Emails to an existing profile

You may at times import emails present in different PST or OST files to your currently under use Outlook profile. This would display all the emails (i.e. the ones already in your account plus the imported ones) together. If you have similar emails in the imported files and in current Outlook profile, you’ll get duplicate emails in Outlook.

Remedy: 

The best and the only option is to select the duplicate emails and delete them individually. Be more careful while importing external data in the future if you want to avoid this hassle.

Cause #3 Failed Sync cycle

When a synchronization request is sent by the “Send/Receive” Button and Outlook fail to respond, it may create the problem of duplication. Some emails may be received successfully by Outlook during the first attempt.

In the second cycle, all the emails get delivered including emails already delivered during the first cycle. This again causes identical emails to exist together in the Outlook inbox.

Remedy: 

Again, manually deleting those duplicate ones is the only thing that can be done.

Cause #4 -Server side corruption

Sometimes a message on the server may get corrupted and start causing some serious headaches. Such a message will generate copies of itself when the “Send/Receive” process is initiated.

Remedy:

To resolve this, you should contact your server administrator and ask him/her to log in to the email server. The admin can then delete the damaged email that is causing the duplication.

Cause #5 – Inbuilt Outlook Settings

An inbuilt setting of MS Outlook may also be the culprit to cause copies of emails to be created.

If the “Leave a copy of the messages on the server” checkbox has been ticked in your account settings then this may cause Outlook to create duplicate emails at each Send/Receive. It can be the answer to why Outlook creates duplicate emails at each Send/Receive.

Remedy:

The simple way to fix this is to uncheck the above-mentioned option.

You can find it under Account Settings -> More Settings -> Advanced

Cause #6: Subscription to mailing list

You may have subscribed to the mailing list of one or more sites that interest you. This is not usually a common cause of receiving duplicate emails in Outlook.Although in some cases, if you have accidentally subscribed twice to a website, it may send you identical emails

Remedy:

Contact the website administrators and inform them about your issue.

Cause #7: Incorrect Outgoing server settings

This happens when you have a profile configured on Microsoft Outlook that contains two POP3 accounts. Both these pointing to the same Outgoing POP3 server. It may lead to duplicate messages being received in the inbox of both accounts

Remedy:

For solving this issue, disable the email receive option for any one of the accounts

1. In Outlook, in the Tools menu, Go to Send/Receive Settings, and then click on Define Send/Receive Groups.

2. Double-click on the group that contains the two POP3 accounts,

3. Under Accounts click any one of the POP3 accounts.

4. Click to clear all items from Receive mail items check box.

Conclusion

We discussed about the reasons for receiving duplicate emails in Outlook and also the remedies to remove duplicate emails from Outlook.

Major causes for this issue to arise are faulty settings within Outlook, corruption of messages, network issues, or  improper synchronization of mailbox data.

If the provided solutions do not prove to be helpful to you, then try SysTools Outlook Duplicates Remover Tool to delete duplicate emails in Outlook 2016, 2013, 2010, 2007 and older versions

James Smith

He is a data recovery expert who works as freelancer technical blogger. He has been in the Data recovery industry for 10+years and specialized in data recovery solutions & data management techniques. He researched on various email client issues & now willing to share information among people through the Web.