I have used many different email addresses in my 10+ years on the Internets. I started with a email address from Brooklyn College, moved on to Hotmail and then several custom domains. I would ping-pong between different corporate emails and amusingly geeky personal ones. But being an Admin by profession I have kept all my craptastic forwards geektacular jokes “Historical Emails”.

I have folders with email messages dating back to 1996. Now I try and stay neat and productive, creating necessary folders for projects or contacts. Archiving when I no longer need instant access to outdated material. But that just doesn’t happen when I am putting out fires around the virtual office all day. And the end result is a inbox full of CRAP! Looking through some of my older emails I found loads of duplicates and for some reason that REALLY annoyed me.

I went looking for a FREE Outlook Duplicate Remover. Easier said then done. All the ones I downloaded were crap-ware. Pure Trial Crap. Trial software is like what Crack is to the drug market. Give them a taste for free, let them see what we can do and then get them hooked. After you are hooked yank it away and ask for money.

But as always I did find what i was looking for – for free. It’s called Vaita’s free Outlook Duplicate Items Remover.

Guess what it does?

Wow, you MakeUseOf readers sure are smart! It removes duplicate items from Outlook! I tried it on Outlook 2003 and it says it works with all versions of Outlook 2000, 2002, 2003 or 2007. I do not see that it works with Outlook Express.

Let’s check it out and I will show you how easy it is to use! After downloading and installing the small 2.11MB File you will be prompted to shut down Outlook to complete your installation.

Upon restarting Outlook you will have a new menu item as you can see below:

Once you click on the ODIR menu Or Hit Alt-O you will be greeted with it’s menu allowing you to simply select what folder you want to run ODIR against. You can do sub-folders but not all the way at the Personal Folder level. Meaning you might have to run this several times against several different folders.

In the instance above I selected a folder in by inbox labeled Sonicwall Alerts. All I do is hit the Remove Duplicate Items button and let the app do it’s magic.

Depending on the amount of messages or items in that particular folder is how long it will take. A folder with a hundred messages will take 30 seconds on a fast machine and a few thousand emails will take a few minutes. Once it finds the messages it creates a sub folder called ODIR_Duplicated_Items and moves the dupes there.

You can then decide if you want to /kill the folder or just individual items. As you and ODIR build a better relationship and you come to trust her… You can just have the folder disappear automagically.

I hear you muttering why did I say items and not messages in that last paragraph… That’s because this will work on Contacts, To-Do Items and Calendar entries! How sweet is that? Undo the damage you did syncing your new device! Are you curious as to how ODIR Works it’s magic? Check out this:

Do you have a similar tool you use? How do you handle Outlook dupes?

(By) Karl L. Gechlik is a superhero of the IT industry who wears many hats and changes in telephone booths. Karl mostly uses his powers for good and the occasional hysterical prank. Get your geek on & follow his geeky antics at the NEW askTheAdmin.com today. Stop by and see what we are all about!