GMAIL REMOVE DUPLICATE MESSAGES SOFTWARE

You can use the -R option to reverse the order in which the folders are processed. If you have a hierarchy of folders, you can search recursively within the children of a particular folder using the -r option and specifying the top-level folder. A warning: If you specify the same mailbox twice, it will look at it a second time, see a whole load of messages it has seen before and so delete them all as duplicates! You have been warned, and that's why you should use the -n option first. You can specify multiple folders to work on, and it work through them in order and will delete or tag, in the later folders, duplicates of messages that it has found either in those folders or in earlier ones.

GMAIL REMOVE DUPLICATE MESSAGES SOFTWARE

Still, this can be a useful option if your software supports it! Note that not all IMAP servers will allow the creation of custom tags, and not all mail programs will allow you to view them. The -t option will, instead of marking messages for deletion, attempt to tag them with the specified custom tag. This will normally have the combined effect of moving any duplicates to another folder. The -y option will copy messages to the specified mailbox before deleting them. The process can take some time on large folders or slow connections, so you may want to add the -v option to give you more information on how it's progressing. When you're ready, leave that out, and it will go ahead and mark your duplicate messages as deleted. The -n option tells IMAPdedup that this is a 'dry run': it stops it from actually making any changes it's a good idea to run with this first unless you like living dangerously. imapdedup.py -s -u myuserid -x -n 'My Important Messages'

Note: IMAPdedup expects to run under Python 3. That should give you a safe place to play! Simple use If you want to experiment, create a new folder on your mail server, and copy some messages into it from your inbox. You just need the imapdedup.py file, and Python 3. IMAPdedup doesn't currently have any installation process. 'Subject: Your review has just been published!') Installation I'd recommend this in general, because some (foolish) automated systems can send you multiple messages within a single second, with different contents but the same headers. If you have messages without a Message-ID header, or you don't trust it, there's an option (-c) to use a checksum of the To, From, Subject, Date, Cc & Bcc fields instead.Īnd if you want to add the Message-ID, if it exists, into this checksum, add the '-m' option as well.

(Note that GMail, for example, does sometimes have some unusual mailboxes.) This is a string generated by email systems that should normally be unique for any given message, so unless you've got some rather unusual mailboxes, it's a pretty safe choice. How it worksīy default, IMAPdedup will simply look for messages with a duplicate Message-ID header. (If your server purges the deleted messages automatically, you may be able to prevent this with the -no-close option.) There is also a 'dry-run' option so you can check what might happen before doing anything scary. Whatever your system does, you will usually have the option to see what has been deleted, and to recover it if needed, using your email program, after running this script. Sometimes they are hidden and can be displayed and un-deleted if wanted, until they are purged. Sometimes deleted messages appear in a 'Trash' folder. Some mail clients will let you still view such messages in situ, so you can take a look at what's happened before 'compacting' the mailbox. Exactly what that does in your environment will depend on your mail server and your mail client. To be more exact, it marks the second and later occurrences of a message as 'deleted' on the server. IMAPdedup is a Python script (imapdedup.py) that looks for duplicate messages in a set of IMAP mailboxes and tidies up all but the first copy of any duplicates found. Please note that recent versions require Python 3.6 or later

Gmail remove duplicate messages