Thunderbird tips and tricks: Remove Duplicate Messages

Many moons ago, when I switched from POP to IMAP, I had to have my laptop and desktop upload all of the locally saved email so I wouldn’t lose anything. This was before I had infinite storage, and the duplicates were eating valuable space on my 4G server drive. Back then, I wrote a perl script that cleaned up my mbox files; but it only deleted duplicates within a given mbox file. These days my email usage is larger, and my sloppage is huge; especially when I consolidate or shift around accounts. I’ve been lazy and just living with it. No longer…

I recently discovered “Remove Duplicate Messages” for Thunderbird. I created a temp account, copied over a few thousand messages, across several folders, twice; then I did a few test runs. As far as I can tell it runs perfectly and doesn’t delete what it shouldn’t.

It isn’t a utility that you’ll be running every day, but when you do run it you will be happy with the results.

-Chris Knight

Why yes, I am a bastard.

joy_cute000111222
1:08
Hello,I’ll be glad to inform you that I have a part time job going on,we are looking for a Male or Female representative,who can be working for us as a partime worker and get ($300) on every work u do. and we are happy to inform you that this would not affect your present state of work.

Chris Knight
1:10
Thank you for contacting me. I already have a side job. I have a buddy at Yahoo who buys me a beer every time I give him a spamming/scamming ID that he can delete and add to his weekly performance index. Congrats, your account has about 20 minutes of life left.

I didn’t even have to add this person to my ignore list… They just went away on their own… 😉

-Chris Knight

I use Amazon affiliate links in some of my posts. I think it is fair to say my writing is not influenced by the $0.40 I earned in 2022.