How to deal with duplicate Emails in Outlook?

Outlook Duplicates Emails always create an extra headache for the user because they slow down Outlook performance as well increase the email management overhead. The problem can be ignored at first, but grows more severe with the increasing number of duplicate Emails in the Outlook inbox.

Here are some common ways to avoid duplicate Emails in Outlook:

• Your entire Outlook rules must end in "Stop Processing" actions so that, no duplicate copies of Emails will be received on the Inbox.
• Multiple running instances of Outlook can cause duplicate copies of the same email arriving in Inbox. So, you must ensure that only one Outlook instance is running.
• You can check it from the task manager and can close Outlook.exe if multiple instances are running.
• If you have multiple Email accounts and you are facing duplicate emails in your Outlook inbox then, deleting and recreating the e-mail accounts can help you to eradicate the problem.
• If you are an Outlook XP user and haven’t upgraded to the latest service pack then, you can face duplicate mails in Outlook inbox. So, upgrade to the latest service pack from Microsoft Product Updates to resolve this problem.

The above described are some of the most common preventive measures that you must take to avoid duplicate Emails in Outlook Inbox. But still if you receive duplicates in your inbox, then you need to delete them. You can delete them manually if they are few in count but if there are large numbers of duplicate Emails in your Outlook Inbox then, it’s a wise choice to use some Outlook duplicate remover tool to remove them.

How to delete duplicate Emails from Outlook?
If you want to delete the Outlook Emails manually then, first you should organize all duplicates together so that they can be deleted quickly.
You can group the mails by:

• Sorting your view by the Modified field.
• Using a Modified Today Search Folder

Steps to sort the mail by the Modified date:

1. Go to View-> Arrange By-> Custom then click  'Sort' to open the Sort dialog.(for Outlook 2007 and Previous versions)
If you are using Outlook 2010 then, go to View-> button View Settings-> Sort
2. At the bottom of Sort dialog, Choose 'Date/Time fields from the “Select available columns from:” dropdown list. Then, click Ok.
3. Now, select the 'Modified field' to place it above the Received field.
4. Finally, Click OK to close all the open dialogue boxes.

Steps to sort duplicate mails using a ‘Modified Today Search Folder’:
There is one more method for locating and grouping the duplicate mails together i.e. with the help of ‘Modified Today Search Folder'. This method is preferably used wherever; rules are used to sort your emails. The Search Folder let you search all messages that were modified today. 

Given below are the steps to create a search folder:
1. Go to File-> New-> Search Folder(Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 )
Go to Folder tab then click the button New Search Folder (Outlook 2010 )
Note: You can also use the short cut 'CTRL+SHIFT+P ' to open the New Search Folder dialog
2. Click 'Create a custom Search Folder'
3. Click 'Choose'
4. Give a desired name to your folder.   
5. Click 'Criteria' to open the  Search Folder Criteria dialog
6.  Set the time filed to : Modified Today (by choosing from the dropdown list)

The Search Folder let you easily locate duplicates across folders.

Once you have sorted and located the duplicates Outlook mails, you can select all of them and simply press delete to remove them.