tek Tip - Outlook Duplicating E-mails

Within the past month I've seen three hard drives go bad. I think it has something to do with the weather being so humid, but that's just a guess. One of the drives belonged to a client so I had to get him up and running on a new computer which means I had to migrate his e-mails over. Luckily they were all on the server -- all 11 thousand of them, so I thought "Bonus." and started Outlook downloading them. I'll spare you the long story, but the bottom line was: ANY time there was an error of ANY kind Outlook would forget it had downloaded all of the e-mails it just downloaded, so when it started again it would get duplicates.

So for example if it downloaded 5 thousand messages in one go before having an error it would have to redownload all of those messages again. If you cancelled it and started again it would remember it just fine, so I did that every few hundred or thousand until I found an e-mail that would always give this error:
Task 'SomeAccount - Receiving' reported error (0x800CCC0F) : 'The connection to the server was interrupted. If this problem continues, contact your server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP).'

I finally got around it in Outlook 2003 by doing Tools -> Send/Receive -> "SomeAccount" Only -> Download Inbox Headers. Oh, and because there were so many mails I was downloading headers anyway. It's not like he needed his 1.5 gigs of e-mails from two years ago.

When it was all done I removed all of the duplicates with this handy little free tool http://accuratesolution.net/AccurateOutlookDuplicateRemover.htm. It worked and it worked for free when nothing else would.