Duplicate emails

[SARCT]

Hi - I am struggling with a duplicate email issue, and have done a bit of internet research to try to resolve it. I have Norton Security installed, and I turned off the Spam and the Antivirus settings related to email, but that doesn't seem to have fixed it. I haven't yet done a full reboot, so maybe that will address it.

It's my wife's email account, and there are something like 306,000 emails with 302,000 unread. The .pst file is 28GB in size. I notice that every time a send/receive is done, it will download 54 emails, plus whatever is new. If nothing is new, it will download 54 emails. This has been developing for some time and I think it used to download a lot more. That said, this setup has been in place for at least 18 months, and she only noticed the issue within the last few weeks, so it feels as if something has changed, but I don't know where to start.

Maybe the best way is to just create a new account/account name and build a new .pst file?

Appreciate any recommendations of where to start, since I feel a bit like I am shooting in the dark.

 

[SARCT]

A further update - it looks like it is the same 54 emails that get downloaded every time a send/receive cycle runs. Through the course of the day, that means that 100's of old emails are downloaded needlessly. They are a random selection of emails from 1 and 2 and 3 years ago - a very odd selection. If I could figure out a way to tell the server 'we already got those' it seems like it would all be resolved.

Appreciate any recommendations.

 

[SARCT]

An update on this in case it is helpful to others...

• the .pst file had increased to over 100GB and over 900,000 emails
• the inbox repair tool literally would run for days
• to 'stop the bleeding' I created a new .pst file and directed all send/receive activity to that new file, while keeping the original .pst static
• I got on to the web email interface from the ISP, and located the 54 emails that were remaining on the server. The server should only have had the last 14 days of emails, so locating these 1 to 3 year old emails was easy. I deleted all of them from the server. Now they can no longer be downloaded and keep causing problems.
• I went to each folder of the old/static .pst file, and ran Home/Clean Up/Clean Up Folder on every folder other than the Inbox. This helps to reduce file size.
• I went to the Inbox and scrolled down until I saw a large mass of the same, duplicated email. Since there were 54 different emails, each duplicated at every send/receive cycle over many months, it was obvious. Then I clicked on one of those emails and ran Home/Clean Up/Clean Up Conversation. This was repeated for every obviously duplicated email. I then ran a Home/Clean Up/Clean Up Folder on the Inbox to clean it up.
• Lastly, I set up an archive to move everything out of that old .pst file that was over a certain date. That runs every two weeks. I ran a manual compact process on the old .pst to reduce the file size dramatically, once all the dupes had been removed from it.

We decided to just use the new .pst file since it was 'clean' and allow the old .pst file to keep reducing as it gets archived off over time.

Hopefully this is useful to anyone who has ended up in a similar situation.