I have thousands of emails in my inbox which duplicate emails in local folders
As AOL is closing down it's desktop service outside of the USA, I decided to start using Thunderbird. I set up the various emails and TB started amazingly to download all my emails history to my inboxes, but not in the folders I had given them in AOL. So I started to create all the local folders and moved many of them to these folders. However when i came back to the machine TB had downloaded them again so I now had 30000+ emails back in my inboxes, most of which were now in local folders too. I was happy with the initial download and will probably have to start again as i don't know how I can remove duplicates that are in local folders as well as now back in my inboxes. What have I done wrong? All I want, after the initial download is to receive all new emails into TB, including those which AOL has put in spam, so I can train TB to reject them.
All Replies (5)
I am guessing you have created your account as imap SO they are synchronized to AOL's servers. moving mail to the local folder will work, but IMAP and Thunderbird appear to not be able to manage the relevant deletions that go with the move to local folders when more than a few hundred email are involved. So I think your biggest problem is you rushed things.
Hi Matt. Thanks for taking the time to reply to my problem. I think everything is POP not IMAP, I am not technically literate enough to know the pros and cons of both. Is there a way to remove duplicates easily? I have had a quick look and tried to move some of the emails to an existing local folder which already contains some of the messages from the first download and they have been accepted, so I have duplicates in that folder. Is there any way of flagging or marking duplicates easily so they can be rejected? it will otherwise be a long job to manually examine and delete duplicates?
re :I think everything is POP not IMAP Right click on mail account in Folder Pane and select 'Settings' Select 'Server Settings' top right ...Server Type: what does it say POP or IMAP mail server?
I have the same problem. Periodically, I suddenly have duplicates of all the emails in my inbox! Is there a quick way to delete them? This has happened several times and is very annoying! I have two accounts in Thunderbird - Verizon email (which is now handled by AOL) and Comcast. I only have this problem with my verizon account.
Thank you for any help you can provide!
Sounds like aol have got old emails transfered to new server Inbox which have been downloaded again.
Duplicates removal addon extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/thunderbird/addon/remove-duplicate-messages-alte/