Any Outlook Gurus?
 

Having a couple of issues with Outlook, but lets concentrate on the most important one :D

We are using Outlook 2003 with the option selected to keep a copy of our emails on the server for 90 days. We use POP access.

I routinely backup any .pst files on our computer to a backup drive. If any of the machines go down I can then recover the .pst file and get people going again. Issue is that regardless how I perform the recovery I end up with a mass of duplicate emails coming down from the server.

My current recovery procedure has been
1) reinstall windows
2) install office
3) open outlook, but don't actually configure an email account
4) navigate through documents and settings and overwrite the blank file it has made
5) Open outlook, setup the account details

At this point nearly all our emails are present, as soon as it connects outlook fails to recognise the local copy of the mails and downloads 90 days of duplicates :(

think the only way to stop duplicates is not to make the copy PST the default one, let it download the mails and attahc the copy PST as a second data file ? then can drag and drop what you need from the copy data file into the new one, and leave the duplicates behind !

Yes, I just tried to do it the other way around. Stupidly I did the following..

1) Open outlook, setup an account and let it download
2) Use the import option and point it to the backup .pst....then..here is the stupid bit...
3) when it says what do you want to do with duplicates, I said leave them out thinking it would actually do that :mad: Silly me, it just imported them all...:lol1:

Of course the other reason for wanting to hold onto the original .pst file is that it has all your settings (rules contacts, tasks etc). Arses :(