How to Remove Duplicate Emails in Office 365
Removing duplicate or redundant data is always a challenging task to do from any platform whether it is from your system, email client, or from web-based email service. So, after understanding the challenge here in this blog post, we are going resolve one of the most asked queries “How to Remove Duplicate Emails in Office 365”.
Well, Microsoft has developed an online productivity suite, Office 365 that contains Online & offline versions of MS Office, Skype for Business, and online versions of SharePoint, Exchange, etc. The user stores all the data of their Office 365 account for exchanging emails, storing contacts, and working on several Office applications in the mailbox.
With the presence of duplicate data items, the mailbox starts growing in size slowing the performance & access time. The blog will be discussing ways to remove duplicate emails in Office 365 and the removal of duplicate contacts & calendar entries.
Reasons for Duplicate Items in Office 365
There can be several reasons for duplicate mailbox items in Office 365. Here are some common causes:
- Settings are not Completely Configured Correctly
- Issue with Synchronization
- Rules and Wrongly Configured Account
Consequences of Duplicate Data Items in Office 365
Duplicate mailbox data items in Office 365 can lead to several issues that can impact productivity and create confusion. Here are some common problems caused by duplicate mailbox data items:
- Cluttered Mailbox: Duplicate items can clutter your mailbox, making it difficult to find and manage important emails, contacts, or calendar events. This can lead to decreased efficiency and wasted time searching for specific information.
- Increased Storage Usage: Duplicate items occupy unnecessary storage space, which can lead to increased storage costs, especially if you have limited storage capacity in your Office 365 subscription. It may also require you to purchase additional storage if you reach your storage limits.
- Data Inconsistency: Duplicate items can create inconsistencies in your data. For example, if you have duplicate contacts, different versions of contact information may be stored, leading to confusion when trying to find the most up-to-date and accurate contact details.
- Synchronization Issues: Duplicates can disrupt the synchronization process across devices. For instance, if a duplicate email is created on one device, it may be synced to other devices, leading to additional duplicates and further complicating the issue.
- Performance Degradation: Large numbers of duplicate items can impact the performance of your mailbox and Office 365 applications. Slower response times, increased loading times, and potential crashes may occur due to the excessive data load caused by duplicates.
- Compliance and Legal Concerns: Duplicate items can complicate compliance and legal requirements. For example, in industries with strict data retention policies, having duplicate items may result in non-compliance if the retention period is based on the total number of items rather than unique ones
Recommended:
Keeping the data safe is always a good option so backup Office 365 mailbox to PST before removing duplicate items.
Eliminate Duplicate Items from Office 365 – Why?
The mailbox of the Office 365 account contains all types of data items like emails, calendars, contacts, etc. Like any other mailbox database, Office 365 also supports maximum default storage capacity, which will create performance issues if it reaches or exceeds the limit.
The size of the mailbox may increase tremendously due to the presence of duplicate or unnecessary items that can result in slower performance and even lead to corruption. The corrupted mailbox will make the data items inaccessible and may loss of the data. User needs to be able to remove duplicate items from Office 365 to avoid mishaps.
Approach to Remove Duplicate items in Office 365
Since there exists no direct method to remove the duplicate items automatically from Office 365 account, we need to extract the mailbox from Office 365 containing emails, contacts, & calendars, etc. to the PST file with the help of this tool (as mentioned in the above section).
To use this tool first you have to configure your Office 365 account with your Outlook, then Launch the software and, select items that you wish to extract like Mails, Contacts, and Calendars, and select the output file as PST. You can either use another automated solution named PST Duplicate Remover Tool to Delete Duplicate data from PST.
Or you can manually remove duplicate emails from Outook by opening the PST file on the Windows System. Follow the steps below to manually delete the duplicate data items such as emails, contact, and calendar from the mailbox:
1. Delete Duplicated Emails in Office 365
- Login to your Office 365 mailbox from which duplicates need to removed
- Go to VIEW Tab, click on Change View and change the folder view to a Table Type View
- Right-click a column heading and click Field Chooser
- At the top of the Field Chooser, select All <item name> fields
- Drag the Modified field to the table heading
- Ensure that the duplicate items have a unique date from the original set of items. If it is unique, click the Modified heading to sort the items by this field.
- Select the first item that you want to delete to the last item while you hold down the SHIFT
- Click on DELETE to delete all the selected items permanently.
2. Remove Duplicate Contacts in Office 365
To remove the duplicate contacts from Office 365, open the PST file in the application and go to People -> Contacts -> Select each contact manually you want to remove.
To remove the duplicate contacts from PST file:
- Select the Contacts folder containing duplicate contacts
- On VIEW Tab in the current view group, click Change View and Click Phone
- Each contact will be listed according to the order of phone number
- Select the contact with the same phone number/email address and right-click on it to delete.
3. Remove Duplicate Calendar Entries in Office 365
- Go to Calendar in the Navigation Pane and select the Calendar folder.
- On VIEW Tab in the current view group, click Change View and Click List
- To arrange all the calendar items by subject, Click the Subject column heading.
- Select duplicate calendar items in the list while you hold down CTRL button
- Click on DELETE after selecting all of the duplicate calendar items.
After completing the whole process mentioned in the above section, now you will have the resultant PST file containing emails, contacts and calendar data without any duplicate items. To complete the Office 365 duplicate removal process and to access the data in the corresponding O365 account, you need to import PST to Office 365 mailbox. As a result, you can view Office 365 mailbox items without any duplication.
Frequently Asked Queries
No, there is no direct methods are available for duplicate removal. For deleting the duplicated items from O365 account, first, you need to extract the mailbox data into the PST file. After that, you can directly remove duplicate data from the PST file and access it the resultant data by import into the Office 365 account.
Yes, other than the email data you can also delete duplicate contacts, calendars, tasks, etc from Office 365. For that, you need to extract the mailbox containing duplicate data items into PST file format.
To remove the duplicated contacts, extract the O365 mailbox containing duplicate contacts in PST file and open it. Then go to People > Contacts > select Change View from View tab > Phone. The contacts will be listed in the order of phone number. Select the contact having the same number and delete it.
After removing the duplicate data from the PST file, to access the data without any duplicate items you need to import the resultant PST file into the respective Office 365 account.