Deleting duplicate emails

[R Avery]

Outlook XP

I have an email folder that has lots of duplicate emails because of
someone who always re-copied an email to the folder when he couldn't
immediately find it (so that the folder would always have at least one
copy of everything), but I need to now rid it of the duplicate emails.
I have written the function below to accomplish the task, but it is so
incredibly slow. I will try to make a smarter algorithm, but even on a
test folder of only 200 mailitems, it takes more than 5 minutes to get
through just half.

Does anyone have a faster solution, or is there some built-in way to
eradicate duplicates? The code I have used is below. Any help would be
most appreciated.



Public Sub DeleteDuplicateEmails()
Dim i As Long, j As Long
Dim mi As MailItem, mi2 As MailItem
Dim fol As MAPIFolder

Set fol = ActiveExplorer.CurrentFolder


With fol.Items
For i = .Count To 1 Step -1
Debug.Print "Looking at mailitem " & i & " of " & .Count
For j = .Count To i + 1 Step -1

Set mi = .Item(i)
Set mi2 = .Item(j)

If IsDuplicateEmail(mi, mi2) Then
mi2.Delete
End If
Next
Next
End With

End Sub


Public Function IsDuplicateEmail(mi As MailItem, mi2 As MailItem) As Boolean
Dim bln As Boolean

bln = (mi2.Subject = mi.Subject) And _
(Abs(mi2.SentOn - mi.SentOn) < 0.00001) And _
(Abs(mi2.ReceivedTime - mi.ReceivedTime) < 0.00001) And _
mi2.CC = mi.CC And _
mi2.SenderName = mi.SenderName

IsDuplicateEmail = bln

End Function

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

There are no built-in methods. You could use Items.SetColumns to speed up
loading the Items collection for the folder, that only loads the columns you
specify instead of every column in every item.

Other than that you could use CDO 1.21 code, which is an order of magnitude
faster than Outlook code in iterating collections of items, or Extended MAPI
(C++ or Delphi) code which is an order of magnitude faster than CDO code. An
alternative to MAPI code is using Redemption, a 3rd party library located at
www.dimastr.com/redemption, Redemption MAPITables are almost as fast as pure
Extended MAPI, although MAPITables have a learning curve.

 

[R Avery]

Thanks! I found a site for Outlook Redemption, and i will see if i can
make this thing work.