Outlook 2003 duplicate emails

Jul 23, 2009

- Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} Currently there are no duplicate accounts.
What Outlook should be able to do is to see that an email was already received and be able to ignore it the next time you do a send/receive.
This is how my iPhpne treats those emails. It will download them ONCE and them the next time it goes to get email, even though the emails are all on the server, it ignores the emails already downloaded – i.e. it compares the emails and sees if they were downloaded before.
In fact Outlook sort-of does this already. B/C when I get a new email which comes through, Outlook will receive that email alone, and claim that it is finished receiving emails, only later to pick up all the emails again.
On the MS KB this problem is documented. Please see below the full description which I wrote about the problem and their solution when I thought I would be able to submit this when I purchased the premium service.


OK here is my problem:
I recently changed the setting on Outlook 2003 to "leave a copy of messages on the server" and I have it set to remove from server after 6 days. The reason that I did this is to be able to have a mobile phone access the email as well and download it to the phone. The problem is that Outlook is downloading NUMEROUS copies of the same email. many many many copies. (My mobile phone on the other hand only downloads 1 copy of the email and then ignores it from juno - I guess recognizing that it has already received that email).
What will normally happen is that it will download the new emails. Then say that send/receive is complete. I can even manually force a send/receive and it will download nothing.Tthen a ½ hour later or so (many times it is unpredictable) it will download all the same emails again. Then some time later download them again and so on and so on. (I ended up with about 2000 extra emails yesterday!)

This is what I have found out so far on my own:
Microsoft details this issue here : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885870/

They say that there is a hotfix which you can download, but they also give many warnings about it and are not taking responsibility for it. They even go to the trouble of making you send a request for the file and the zip file which they send you is password protected. They send you the password, but it expires after 1 week.

In any even they also say that it would have been included in Office service pack 2. I already have service pack 3 installed. I tried to re-install it, but that didn’t work.
I then tried to reinstall the entire MS Office 2003 Professional and then re-install SP3 and that didn’t work.

As far as I can see the only things which I didn’t try were to either completely un-install Office and then to do a full install OR to try out the MS hotfix.
I don’t really want to do either one of them if I don’t have to….

Do you have any suggestions?