Remove duplicate emails from Mail.app

Oct 28, '02 09:00:40AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

On several occassions in the past, problems with email clients, importing old email, downloading email again after some error, etc. has resulted in several duplicated emails. Rather than sifting through the entire list of emails searching for ones with the same subject and delivery time, I stumbled across this feature in Mail that does it almost automatically!

You can approach this one of two ways, one being a bit easier than the other. If you can select only emails and their duplicates and make sure not to select emails that have no duplicates, you can use the easy method. Just highlight all the emails and their duplicates (only!), click to switch to another email folder, then click back to the folder you had selections in. You should find that only one of each duplicated emails are selected so just click on delete to remove them.

If you either aren't sure if you have duplicates or not, or the duplicates are inconviently scattered throughout non-duplicated emails, this is a tiny bit more work but works. Create a new email folder -- call it "Temp" or something easy to remember/find.

Select all the email in the folder you want check. Click on another folder and return to the first. All non-duplicated and one of each duplicated emails are now selected. Drag them to the temporary folder you created. Return to the original folder and delete everything in there. Now just move all the email in the temporary folder back to the original and delete the temporary folder.

I'm not sure what causes it, but sometimes Mail will do something and deselect duplicate emails before I move to another folder, but I have not been able to figure out what causes Mail to do that, or recreate it, so moving to another folder is the quickest way I've found to deselect the duplicates.

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