Projo Subterranean Homepage News

I use Thunderbird, Mozilla's Firefox companion, as a mail client.

I've been having some hardware issues lately -- the kind that have the fan coming on loudly and usually end in a power-supply replacement -- and late last night I heard a lot of churning and couldn't close Thunderbird, so I ended it with Task Manager.

This morning, I realized I had blown out the message pointers (markers used by your mail program to tell your server what the next unread message is, so you don't download everything every time). I saw I was about to download some 7,555 messages, two years' worth, from the server.

(Yes, I should have cleaned them off the server long ago.)

I archive mail in local dated subfolders when it piles up, so the oldest messages weren't difficult to grab in chunks and delete.

But the most recent messages in my inbox -- the entire first quarter of 2009, which I had planned to move on Tuesday -- came in as dupes, displaying neat pairs, one read, one unread. There was no easy way to grab screenfuls.

There has to be a way to remove dupes, I thought, and typed, "thunderbird remove duplicates" into Google. Sure enough, there's an add-on, Remove Duplicate Messages 0.1.06. I installed it while messages poured in. When the latest messages on the server arrived -- singles, which I had never fetched before -- I closed TBird and reopened it.

Remove Duplicate Messages was now in Tools--> Extensions with an Options option. The instructions said it would make a list of dupes, and offer a choice of which one to delete. The default was the first one, and I could refine that by indicating that I preferred the unread one, if there was one. I selected "Delete all," and it did. Quickly, painlessly. I emptied the trash, and the problem was over.

I continue to be grateful for folks who have these problems themselves, solve them, and take the time to package and share their solutions for those who can't do it without them.

So... Thorsten W. Schmidt, author of Remove Duplicate Messages, here's to you. Thank you.

Outlook users seem to have a similar tool, Outlook Duplicate Items Remover 1.4.2, but I don't use Outlook where I don't have to, so can't vouch for it.

 Tags  dupes tech tips

---

Leave a comment

Name:

Email:

URL:  

Remember personal info?

Captcha:

Type the characters you see in the picture above.