Let’s face it, Microsoft Outlook is an irreplaceable tool for most of us. It’s an all-in-one tool for business email, calendar, notes and tasks. Even if your Outlook Inbox isn’t loaded with hundreds of messages everyday, it’s just a matter of time when you’ll find yourself getting lost in messy folders.

Eventually you may have to combine various old pst files, import email, contacts and calendar or use synchronization tools. These are only few ways of how you may end up with the big issue – Outlook duplicates. Outlook duplicates are not only inconvenient – it makes it harder for you to navigate your folders. Duplicates, especially in email or contact folders, will take a lot of space and can easily slow down the performance of the program or even make it crash.

We decided to share with you some Outlook duplicates prevention tips and clean-up options. Read further to see how to prevent Outlook from getting cluttered.

5 essential tips to avoid Outlook duplicates

Synchronization can cause Outlook duplicate contacts and emails

Synchronization often leads to Outlook email, contacts and calendar duplication. For instance, if you synchronize your PC with a laptop and place email to different folders on both devices.

In other cases, synchronization just happens to be incorrect or interrupted. It's a tricky process and if you want to use synchronization software, you must stick to one tool. If you keep changing the tools, you will end up with more dupes.

If you need a single tool for synchronizing your Outlook contacts, calendar and tasks, with your smartphone or Google, you can try the Sync2 software. It allows you to try it out for 2 weeks to see how the program works for you.

Importing information

Avoid importing information from different sources as they tend to have limited amount of fields. Contacts from Outlook will not be identical to contacts in Google, as Google simply does not have all the fields.

Prevent Outlook duplicate contacts to appear

If you want to prevent Outlook duplicate contacts,go to the File tab > Options > Contacts/People. Then select select "Check for Duplicate Contacts When Saving New Contacts" and click OK.

Avoid multiple accounts and profile recreation

Avoid re-creating or re-adding email accounts, as they tend to re-download all emails again. When you re-create them after originally setting the option of your Outlook to leave a copy on the server, all the emails will be collected again. This process happens because the new profile isn't aware that all these emails have been received before by the old profile.

Check Rules to prevent Outlook duplicate email

You should always check the Rules as this is one of the most common reasons why duplicates appear. Check them to make sure duplicates are not created in the inbox. Also when you set up the "Move to folder" rules, every time you get a new email, Outlook will execute all of them. Make sure that your rules end in "stop processing more rules".

How to effectively remove contact duplicates in Outlook?

If you're still reading, perhaps you already have your Outlook cluttered and just want to clean it up. Well, the bad thing is that you cannot clean dupes without third party tools, while the new Outlook version will create links between duplicated contacts, they will still be there. For removing Outlook contact duplicates, we encourage you to try Mergix.

Free Outlook Contacts Duplicate Cleaner

Duplicate contacts are annoying and distracting. Usually they appear in all devices and services we use, since they're all synchronized or connected. The good way to solve this problem is to unify the contacts list and merge it across the services. That's how you solve the problem from the roots.

If you're using Outlook 365 or have an Exchange account, you can turn to Mergix. Outlook duplicate contacts can be removed using the Mergix web app. You will be able to automatically remove Outlook Duplicate Contacts, review and manually merge similar and delete junk entries.

Mergix is the best fit if you want to have a unified and unduplicated contact list across your connected sources (Exchange, Office 365, iCloud, Gmail).

Outlook duplicate remover for contacts, email & calendar

If you need to clean duplicates from almost any Outlook folder, please check Outlook Duplicate Remover. It will remove identical Outlook duplicates within only a few clicks. This software is very useful after a failed migration or email account re-creation, which pulls all mail from the mail server again to your data file with all previously received emails.

Outlook Duplicate Remover is an add-in and is easily accessible from the ribbon.

Duplicate Remover can also help you to clean up Junk Contacts. These are incomplete contacts that have only a few fields. The tool will list them by groups and suggest cleaning them at will.

Outlook Duplicate Remover can also help you with cleaning Conflicting items, which are not entirely duplicates and similar contacts:

Advanced Outlook Duplicate Cleaner

If you're looking for a more advanced tool, you should check out the other software – Duplicate Killer. The difference is that with Duplicate Killer you can select criteria for managing duplicates and similar items. While Duplicate Remover does all the cleaning with only a few clicks, the other tool, Duplicate Killer, allows customizing the deduplication process to your needs.

We hope that you will find this information useful and your Outlook has no duplicates already. Thanks for reading!