Probably the only thing more annoying than having duplicated music or photos on your hard drive is having duplicated emails or contacts in your email client. Forgiving the slight exaggeration preceding – needless redundancy can be problematic. If you’ve recently migrated your communications for a previous email platform into Microsoft Outlook it can happen that the import/export routine isn’t 100% fail-safe. Quirks and hiccups can introduce duplicate contacts, calendar events, or even emails – all of which make finding a particular item more difficult.
While you could take the time to clean up the resulting mess by hand, it’s a painstaking process that is just as well prone to error as the initial import!
Outlook Duplicate Items Remover is a free Outlook plugin that introduces functionality true to it’s name. Once installed, ODIR can be initiated from within Outlook where it will scan notes, contacts, email, events, etc for any duplication. In my usage, ODIR does an excellent job at highlighting redundancy – it does this by comparing fields that are typically specific for the item in question. It’s quite logical to conclude that if the first and last name as well as email address match two different contacts – they are most likely the same person.
ODIR uncovers other items by comparing:
- Appointment items against:
subject, location, start date and end date - Task items against:
subject, start date, due date and status - Note items against:
contents of the note (Body property) and color - E-mail items against:
- received emails: the internet message ID
- sent emails: email subject and the time the email is sent
- unsent emails: email subject only
Outlook Duplicate Items Remover supports all 32-bit versions of Outlook from 2000 and newer and was tested with Outlook 2007.
