.NET Ramblings - Brian Noyes' Blog - Removing duplicate posts from Outlook and Newsgator

Saturday, January 01, 2005

Removing duplicate posts from Outlook and Newsgator

I use Newsgator for aggregating feeds into Outlook. Unquestionably the best tool available if you a) read blogs, and b) use Outlook for email or other daily functions.

I also frequently rebuild my laptop where I run Outlook and Newsgator. Being a speaker, trainer, writer, and consultant, I often introduce new software onto my machine, try things out, install and uninstall various betas and things, and I don't always feel like paying the perf penalty of doing it all in a VM. So a lot of software entropy accumulates on my machine, requiring frequent rebuilds, which take all of about 30-60 minutes to get back to a fully loaded and stable development machine baseline thanks to Norton Ghost.

The one thing that has annoyed me in doing this is that every time I rebuild my machine, then reattach Outlook to my Blogs.pst file where my subscribed feeds go, Newsgator redownloads all the latest posts into the subscribed folders, resulting in tons of duplicate posts. This is a pain on two fronts. One, it means that a bunch of posts get added that are marked as unread, even though there are copies of them in there that have been read. I haven't cracked that nut yet. The other problem is just the presence of the duplicate posts in the first place. That means that my blogs.pst file has been getting really big, which complicates my backups, and causes my Lookout and Google Desktop indexes to take longer to build and take up a lot more diskspace.

Enter MAPILAb Outlook Duplicate Email Remover. For a mere $15, this add-in does an outstanding job of scouring your Outlook folders and removing emails (or Newsgator posts, which use the Outlook email type for storage) that are duplicates. Well spent money.

Blogging | Languages and Tools

Saturday, January 01, 2005 2:17:31 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [2] |

Saturday, January 01, 2005 5:06:49 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

You can use the free NewsGator Online now to solve this problem as well. Set yourself up to sync up your subscription information. Then, when you reinstall Outlook next time, you don't even need to worry about bringing your subscription list forward with you. They'll be stored online, along with a list of what you've already read, so NG Outlook will only download the things you haven't seen yet.

Of course, you'll still want to keep your Blogs.pst, but at least you won't have to run a third party tool.

- Brad (NewsGator shill :-p)

Brad Wilson

Tuesday, January 18, 2005 8:46:02 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Thanks for the recommendation, Brian. It has definitely helped removing some of my duplicates. But what I noticed with Newsgator is that when people re-post a blog entry (usually with spelling corrections or additional or updated information) Newsgator treats it as a new post. The MAPILab tool doesn't seem smart enough to treat these as duplicates. It's set up to check (at a minimum) based on Subject, Sender's Email and Text. The duplicate posts in Newsgator fall under subject and name but not Text. I wish there was a way to turn that off for certain folders. Are you seeing the same results?

Dave Bost

Comments are closed.