It's a problem we've all faced before: We venture away from web based email programs to try those cool-looking desktop email clients everyone's raving about. After getting through the hassle of making sure everything syncs properly, one of the problems many seem to face is duplicate messages. Well, open source Thunderbird users don't stand around letting problems be; They face them with Thunderbird customizations like the Remove Duplicate Messages add-on. Released by Thorsten W. Schmidt on the Mozilla site, the add-on searches a given folder for duplicate messages and automatically deletes them by tagging all duplicates with a delete flag and one message with the keep flag. To use it, first install it from the Mozilla site. Once installed, open Thunderbird and right click on a folder. Click "Remove Duplicate Messages" and that's it.
The add-on also lets you configure what fields you want to compare such as sender, message, etc. It also checks sub-folders, and can analyze about 1000 messages per second. Finally, you can choose to keep the the bigger, smaller, unread, first found, or last found Message if you have a preference.
[via ghacks]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
12-18-2007 @ 9:59AM
Christina Warren said...
I just going to be the snarky one and comment - hey, it only took them three years to do this! Duplicate messages (and Thunderbird's previous hellacious treatment of the problem) was the main reason I could never make it my full-time client because just on session of trying to sort through a couple of hundred duplicates was enough to make me throw up my hands and say, "screw it - back to Outlook."
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