How to Remove Duplicate Attachments from Outlook

Overview

As MS Outlook is commonly used as a professional email platform by several organizations, employees exchange email messages for their daily work updates. The mail flow in the organization often involves a lot of attachments duplicates as the messages from external & internal senders are forwarded to colleagues, bosses, and relevant departments.

Basically, the duplicate items present in the Outlook profile increase the size of the email database, which may slow down the overall Outlook performance. Moreover, The blog will be discussing how to remove duplicate attachments from Outlook.

Causes of Attachment Duplication in Outlook

1. The email was forwarded several times, with an attachment added with each forward.
2. The same attachments from the different emails may be sent from several addresses, especially in MNCs. 
3. An identical copy of the attachment is kept in each place, and the email is copied to a different mailbox folder.
4. The person receiving the email has many different Outlook accounts. Because the same email was sent to all of these accounts, multiple copies of the attachments were made.
5. The way the recipient’s email account is set up might cause duplicate attachments.
6. Attachments may also show up as duplicates due to flaws in email clients.

Issues User Face that Leads to Remove Duplicate Attachments from Outlook

One of the most often used programs that comes with the Microsoft Suite is Microsoft Outlook. For Outlook to function properly, a lot of resources are needed. For Outlook users, duplicate attachments and messages are a common issue. You will almost certainly encounter the following issues which are mentioned below.

1. Wasted Storage Space: Duplicate attachments use unneeded storage space in email servers, cloud storage, or local devices. Higher storage costs and less space for new files or emails could arise from this.
2. Confusion: Having several duplicates of an attachment might clog your file storage or email inbox, making it harder to locate the important file among the clutter. This may cause uncertainty and ineffective file management.
3. Version Control Problems: If there are several copies of the same file due to duplication, it might not be obvious which version of the attachment is the most recent or accurate. Mistakes or misunderstandings may occur if outdated versions are inadvertently accessed or used.
4. Data Integrity Issues: If one copy of an attachment is modified but the other copies are not, this can create a variety of data integrity issues that result in discrepancies between the different versions of the attachment’s data.
5. Backup and Restore Difficulties: In the backup, you will find duplicate attachments that will increase the file size that needs to be backed up and also impact the storage budget and slow restoring capability. If we recover the backup file that contains duplicate attachments, it will create duplicate attachments in the folder, thus complicating the report-gathering process.

Requirements to Delete Duplicate Attachments in Outlook

When the employee receives an email, that should have been addressed to a different employee of the same organization, he/she will forward the email without further delay. It will create at least two copies of the attachments (if present) in the mailbox.

However, the attached files will be dragged with the emails irrespective of their size, file type, etc. If situations like this are repeated, then database will contain lots of identical files. To manage the mailbox size and to improve Outlook performance, we need to remove duplicate emails from Outlook along with its attachments.

How to Remove Duplicate Attachments from Outlook

• Delete Duplicate Attachments in Outlook Using the Attachments Line

1. Start Outlook and open the message having duplicate attachments or messages received with duplicates.
2. Look for the attachments located under the headers, next to the message icon
3. Select and right-click the attachment, and click on ‘Remove attachment’ from the menu. Confirm the deletion by clicking on ‘Remove Attachment’ from the pop-up window.

• Remove Duplicate Attachments from Outlook email body

1. Open the Email message containing duplicate attachments. Search if the message contains duplicate items you want to remove.
2. Click on the attachment to highlight it. After that selecting the attachment, a dotted line will appear.

Go to the Move menu at the top menu and select ‘Actions’. Click on ‘Edit Message’ from the drop-down box. Select the ‘Delete’ key on the keyboard to delete the duplicate attachment.

Limitations of Using Manual Method to Delete Duplicate Attachments in Outlook

• Consumption of Time: Manually identifying to remove duplicate attachments from Outlook can take considerable time, especially if you have many emails with attachments.
• Susceptible to Mistakes: Humans often make errors when they try to manually identify or remove duplicate attachments; these mistakes might include accidentally deleting an important file or failing to eliminate all duplicates.
• Inefficiency in Large Data Sets: People who also have large email collections or multiple folders that contain attached files will find it impractical and inefficient to delete duplicates manually.
• Risk Associated with Loss of Data: Deleting attached files wrongly could lead to data loss, particularly when backups are not regularly done or when there is no way to retrieve accidentally deleted files.
• Not Expandable: Manual solutions do not scale well for organizations with multiple users or complex needs on email management since they depend on efforts by individual users which cannot be easily copied across different accounts.
• Resource Intensive: Manually deleting duplicate attachments requires significant user time and effort, diverting resources away from more productive tasks.

Instant Solution to Remove Duplicate Attachments from Outlook

These manual methods to delete duplicate attachments in Outlook may not work in all versions of MS Outlook and consume lots of unnecessary time. In order to remove duplicate Email items from Outlook effortlessly, we can use a third-party tool Outlook Duplicate Email Remover.

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Moreover, The software has been enabled to draw out duplicate data items from multiple Outlook PST files at a time. This Windows-based tool is capable of removing duplicate attachments from Outlook both ANSI & UNICODE PST file types.

Quick-Step Guidance of Expert Suggested Software

1. Firstly, Run the above-suggested tool on your system.
2. Select the Add Files or Add Folders option.
3. Now select Duplicate Options, and also select  Within Folders or Across Folders > click Next.
4. Now, choose the required folders.
5. From Change, choose the destination path and click Next.
6. Afterwards, apply the required filter setting from the filter option.
7. Finally, click Next to begin the process.

Conclusion

In the blog, we have discussed the issue of increasing mailbox size in the Outlook profile due to the presence of duplicate data items such as attachments. The manual method on how users can delete duplicate attachments has been described. However, since the manual method does not provide satisfactory results, a third-party tool has been suggested as an easy process to remove duplicate attachments from Outlook.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. What are the consequences of duplicates in Outlook?

Ans – Duplicates in Microsoft Outlook can also create lots of issues. For example,
1. Performance degrade
2. Storage space issue
3. Low productivity
4. Outlook become

Q2. How to remove duplicates from the password-protected PST file?

Ans – In order to delete duplicates from the protected PST file, take the help of SysTools Outlook Duplicate Remover. It will surely clean up duplicates from protected PST also.