Merge multiple folders

[David]

Desperately calling out for help. To cut a long story short, my
father-in-law has had to have a load of data recovered and we have managed to
import his emails back into Outlook 2003. Unfortunately this has left us
with other 1,000 individual folders each with anything between 10 to 300
emails in. There are many duplicates. I need to get these into one folder
so that they are easier to navigate as he needs to find and access some of
his old emails. They are all within the same pst file.

Does anyone have any idea how to merge many folders together?

As a secondary issue, does anyone know how to de-duplicate email messages?

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

Remove Dupes: http://www.slipstick.com/addins/mail_duplicates.asp

To merge folders, you'll need to go to each one, select all (ctrl+a) and
drag the items to the folder you want them in. Then drag the empty folder
to the deleted items folder.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]



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[David]

I was hoping for something a little more automated. There are LITERALLY over
1,000 folders, which is going to take some time to do manually. I take it
there are no standard functions for that sort of thing?

Any tricks I could use, like search folders or something similar that could
merge that I could then ctrl+a and move all of them?

Does Outlook accept VBA? Is there any script I could run?

 

[David]

I've just had an idea. Could I create a rule that has some criteria that
includes all of those emails and tell it to move them into one particular
folder? I'm sure I can tell rules to run on emails already received. Can I
select multiple folders to apply to?

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

Yes, you can do that, but you can't run it on all folders at once. I'm not
sure its any faster than Ctrl+A in an open folder.

But... Search folders (and Advanced Find) will work, as long as the folders
are in one pst. If you have multiple psts, you'll need a search folder in
each pst. Select the top level of the pst and check the box to search
subfolders and leave the criteria blank.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]



Outlook Tips by email:
(e-mail address removed)

EMO - a weekly newsletter about Outlook and Exchange:
(e-mail address removed)

You can access this newsgroup by visiting
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newsreader to msnews.microsoft.com.

 

[David]

Sounds like a good idea. I know he can view them all in one go from a
search, but I didn't know I could select them and move them from the search
panel. I'll give it a go when I'm next there.

Thanks for your help.