Email administration should be just one of the duties of a typical administrator for any large company. Most often email administration is performed by network administrators and sometimes by operating system administrators. Most day to day email administration consists of pretty routine activities.

However, you’ll sometimes find yourself with a never before seen problem. One such problem is that of duplicate emails. Thankfully, this is an infrequent occurrence.

Email inboxes use up a lot of space as it is and having limits on the amount of inbox space a user can use can be helpful as an alert mechanism for spotting trouble with duplicate email messages. A lot of duplicate emails can use up a lot of space and fill up your end users’ inboxes almost overnight. And these duplicate email messages can certainly cause confusion and negatively impact a company’s productivity.

Some administrators have noticed this problem when they’ve downloaded email messages using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 from a POP3 (Post Office Protocol) email server and then on their next download they notice that duplicate email messages have been downloaded as well.

There are a couple of different reasons why this can happen. There is an option called, “Leave a copy of messages on the server” which if enabled can create an environment that allows duplicate emails to be downloaded. Luckily, this problem was fixed in a hotfix. That hotfix has been included as of Service Pack 2. The latest Office 2003 service pack corrects this problem.

If you’ve just installed the hotfix then you will see duplicate email messages the first time you download but the duplicate downloads will stop occurring after that initial download.

If you wish to enable the “Leave a copy of messages on the server” option then you can start by opening up the Tools menu and clicking on “E-mail Accounts”. Then click on “View or change existing e-mail accounts” and then click on Next. Locate your POP3 email account and click “Change”. You’ll next have to click on “More Settings” which will allow you to choose the “Advanced” tab. Here you will want to check mark the “Leave a copy of messages on the server” check box. Then click OK or hit the enter key.

There are other circumstances that allow for duplicate email messages to get downloaded. One such circumstance that allows this to happen is if there are multiple POP3 email accounts associated with the same profile in Outlook.  When your end user logs on to Outlook they may be prompted for their password for one of their accounts and that is the point when they will receive duplicate email messages. Those two accounts are likely pointing to the same POP3 email server which results in an end user getting duplicate emails.

You can fix this by turning off email reception for one of those accounts. Bring up Outlook and bring up the Tools menu. Locate “Send/Receive Settings” and click on “Define Send/Receive Groups”. You’ll have to determine which group contains the two POP3 email accounts. Once you know which group that is then double-click that group and under Accounts select the POP3 email account that you want to stop receiving duplicate email messages and click on it. Then clear the “Return mail items” check box. This will disable that particular email account from receiving any further emails and hence stop the duplicate emails from appearing.

Another situation that results in duplicate email messages is if the email server contains corrupt email messages in the users’ inbox. As the administrator you’ll have to check the logs for possible error messages related to corrupt email. If you determine that there are corrupt email messages on the server then you’ll have to log in to the server and delete them.

There are times when you have reinstalled the system software and also needed to reinstall Outlook. Sometimes, after an Outlook reinstall, your users will receive duplicate email messages. Other times duplicate messages may result after a user has synchronized Outlook with one of their mobile devices such as a PDA, Palm, a smart phone or other Windows mobile device.

If necessary, before any settings are changed – such as the ones mentioned above – it would be a good idea to have an end user scan and identify duplicate email messages. Obviously this is a non-productive use of their time. So having a tool in your toolbox that can scan for, identify and delete duplicate email messages can be a great time saver. There are many tools on the market that can help you with this activity.