If you are like me, you sometimes happen to meet the problem of a mass of duplicate messages
in Outlook Express, an otherwise ok program.
I had over 4000 messages, some were not just duplcates, but triplicates!
It was just too much to sort through manually and the fix programs cost money! Which I was not in the mood to spend for this.
I then found out that Thunderbird had a duplicate message remover add-on. I THEN IMPORTED ALL MY MESSAGES FROM OE TO T-BIRD and used the remove duplicate feature. (It is an extension which installs in 2 seconds!) I now have no duplicates in my inbox
and I can import my messages back into OE if I want to.
Probably a bit more tedious,, but fully possible...
But I like T-bird and I justy might stick to it. They just seem to try a little harder......
The best thing about it all is that I have now arranged backup to another mail account and will also be more diligent to sort my messages and only keep what i need to keep and keep this in a place (two actually) that is secure. This is easy nowadays.
Oh, I almost forgot, the most annoying feature with OE is that is by default LEAVES NO MESSAGES ON YOUR SERVER!
I had set it to leave the messages there, but a OE duplicate fix program I tried seemed to have undone this setting and it all got deleted.
I was then stuck with all the duplicates ONLY and HAD to sort it out.
Anyway, a happy ending to a bit of a traumatic story. The whole thing happened just as I was leaving from one continent to another and had to leave my baby (laptop) behind. It was a bit of a "crisis". Another issue was that I was unable to see any messages in my inbox at all. They seemed to have vanished into thin air althoug I knew there were 4000 of them! I then did a search for *.dbx files and found them again and put them on a loose HDD and took them home to work on it there. Previously I had set the storage file location to another place than the default and trying to fix the duplicate problem had obviously also reversed this setting. Just sharing this to show that there is always a way and I hope this can help someone else sometime. If you use OE for any length of time some or all of this will probably happen to you too sooner or later.
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