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General discussion

Removing duplicate Personal Folders in Office 2003

Aug 6, 2010 1:15PM PDT

For some reason I have duplicate Personal Folders in my Office 2003.

The head of the folder list says Personal Folders, then I show

AVG Virus Vault
Calendar
Contacts
Deleted Items
Drafts
Inbox
Journal
Junk E-mail
Notes
Outbox
Sent Items
Spam Mail
Tasks
Search Folders

Immediately below those I have a section that says Archive Folders

Then underneath Archive I see an almost complete duplicate set of Personal Folders.

What is the story there, and how can I get rid of the duplicates without risking crashing the program?

Thanks in advance,
Rick

Discussion is locked

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Tell us more.
Aug 6, 2010 9:55PM PDT

I'm not sure what you mean by 'folders in Office 2003'.

Are these additional folders displayed in Windows Explorer under C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office?

If not, what is the path to these folders?

Mark

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The folders list seen from the Outlook Today desktop
Aug 6, 2010 11:19PM PDT
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Re: archive folders
Aug 7, 2010 12:18AM PDT

Outlook has the option to archive the contents of folders to similarly named archive folders. That's a MOVE, not a COPY. So these archive folders should contain old mails that disappeared from the 'normal' folders. Just to keep them smaller.
If you like that, keep it as it is. If you don't like it, move them back, disable all automatic archiving and don't do it manually.

Kees

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Thanks
Aug 7, 2010 1:44AM PDT

Kees, thanks. I'm okay with the Archive folders. The specific set I'm wanting to remove is the duplicate set of Personal Folders that appear at the bottom of the photo at the link.

I'm not sure how they got into the installation, but they are cluttering up the place.

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Re: cluttering up
Aug 7, 2010 6:58AM PDT

- What's the content of these folders? Are they empty, a duplicate of some time ago, or a exact duplicate that's kept current all day?
- Could it be that there is a second .pst file, that can be removed?
- If you click on the minus sign next to the "Personal Folders" text, it's only one line. Annoying, but hardly worth much trouble to solve it.
- Is it possible to rename that single line (to, for example, Don't Use)?
- Is it possible to delete that last line by right clicking? Be sure to have a backup of your .pst-files before you do that?

Kees

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Content -
Aug 7, 2010 12:15PM PDT

Some of them are empty, but others (Inbox and Sent mail) are old stuff with a few duplicates. The only thing that is current is the Calendar.

Regarding the Calendar, I am thinking it has something to do with some Exchange settings. A while back I tried to share my Outlook calendar on the home network and something went awry.

I could rename the folders, etc., but I would rather clean up the tree and have only the folders in view that I use. If I decide to just try deleting I will make a backup copy of the pst files. I know the value of that -- don't worry about how, just trust me!

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Re: duplicate folders
Aug 8, 2010 4:48AM PDT

This is the first time, as far as I can see, that you mention Exchange is at play. Then those folders might not be on your local hard disk in a .pst file but somewhere on the MS Exchange server. In that case, better contact the manager of that server.

Kees

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Exchange
Aug 8, 2010 7:15AM PDT

No server. I'm on a home network.