I imported emails from thunderbird, realising I have hundreds of duplicates. Have you any idea how to remove duplicates in Mail 6.2? I tried Mail Scripts but they are not working with Mac OS 10.8.
Thanks!
Hello Matt
Maybe you could try this:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3513171?start=0&tstart=0
Hope this helps,
xeni
Hello Xeni,
thanks for your help. I've tried this already, the Mail Scripts seem not to work under Mountan Lion.
Any other suggestions?
thanks,
Matt
I'm sorry Matt! Other than Googling for it I have no idea. 😟
I have used scripts before but never with mail.
I will keep looking but so far I haven't found anything...
xeni
Are the duplicates in the same directory? One way to do this would be to use a UNIX shell script, which could compare each of the email files, identify duplicates and delete them.
If you are feeling adventurous, there is a thread in a forum (http://forums.devshed.com/unix-help-35/bash-script-to-find-and-get-rid-of-duplic ate-files-184849.html) that has a pretty interesting looking script at the end. It does and md5 sum on each file (which should always be the same for identical emails), and then deletes the second file. (Actually the deleteing bit is commented out, it just prints what it would do if you remove the '#' before the "rm".
The principle looks good - but I cannot vouch for it at all!
Cheers,
Rodney
p.s. PLEASE back up before trying anything.
Thanks Rodney,
this is a bit too adventurous for me, I think. I am going to switch back to thunderbird, there is an add on for thunderbird removing duplicates.
Cheers,
Matt
Are you using IMAP? If you are, keep using Mail, but if Thunderbird has a plugin for removing duplicates, then all the duplicates removed will also be removed in Mail. From there you can uninstall Thunderbird if you want to continue using Mail or keep both.
Hey Matt
I'm glad to see others are helping 🙂
Maybe try what mhadjar says. That might work.
xeni
Any luck / updates?
Hey all,
thanks for your help. I don't have imap yet, and I am afraid that imap might not work with thousands of emails in my inbox collected over years.
I think I will try importing it in thunderbird, using the remove-emails-add on and then importing it back into Mail.
Using POP email is a isn't good with emails. All POP does is deliver the email to you and your devices that are signed in and that's it. So once you read and delete an email on one device, the other device still; has it as new. IMAP however stores messages on the server and once you read a message on one device, it checks with the server and updates it everywhere else. So in short you really should go with IMAP for ease of use.
Hi Matt,
I have also had issues with duplicate e-mails collected over the years, I found that the best solution (for me at least) was to set up Thunderbird as an IMAP client and then use the Add-On duplicate e-mail finder. This seems to work really well and will also find duplicates across several folders if you search from the root folder.
Once you've filtered the e-mails from the server, you can either uninstall Thurderbird and go back to Mail, or leave Thunderbird for when you need to filter again. I would also agree with XENiCraft about not using POP, I keep copies of the IMAP folders on my local machine for when I don't have full internet connection.
Hope this helps
Glenn
This is a slightly old post but having read it I was wondering, was your duplicate problem caused by Thunderbird; Mail or something else.
I am considering moving away from Mail to Thunderbird. I had problems with Mail-Act-On creating duplicate e-mails and not sending them to the correct folder.
As for IMAP, not all of my email providers support IMAP. For example O2, who for a time were the sole supplier for iPhones in the UK. Apple obviously didn't care whether O2 supported IMAP. I don't have an iPhone myself but I do have an iPod Touch.
How do I delete duplicate emails in Mail 6.2?
