Have you been receiving multiple copies of the same email? There could be a connection issue in your email delivery or downloading process. Below are some of the solutions that might help you resolve receiving duplicate emails.
Duplicate Email Issue #1
Occasionally I get two copies of an email.
Possible Cause: This may be due to a failure to confirm that the email was already delivered, possibly in the email delivery process. This may be from the client appliction sending from your machine or a delivery issue on the server.
Possible Solution: In some cases antivirus software on your machine or local network protection can trigger your email software to detect as if the email has not been sent, when in reality it already has. This is most common in Outlook. You may need evaluate this more if it becomes recurring issue. If the issue is occurring outside of your local network, it may be impossible to figure out where the duplication occurred.
A process on how email servers deliver email:
This shows an example for point of reference being sent sent from ben@senderemail.com to marv@receiveemail.com.
- After a successful negotiation on both server for a connection, the mail server for senderemail.com pushes the email to the receiving mail server.
- The connection between the two servers remains open while receiveemail.com scans the message for spam, malware or any virus contents.
- Once the email has been cleared safe for delivery, receiveemail.com queues it for local delivery to Marv's mailbox.
- When the email reaches Marv's mailbox on receiveemail.com, a message is sent back to senderemail.com notifying it of a successful delivery.
This process holds true to most mail servers to ensures that all email is properly scanned, delivered, and accounted for. However, in very rare cases, an interruption between steps 3 and 4 can cause a message to be delivered more than once.
For example, if the connection is interrupted after receiveemail.com queues the message for delivery to Marv's mailbox, but before a confirmation can be sent back to senderemail.com, the sending server will try to redeliver the message.
Since the original copy was queued for local delivery it will come through, but since the sending server never received confirmation, it will try to deliver again - resulting in duplicate emails. This is more likely to happen when the server is under high load, or when the email is coming over a high-latency network. The issues leading to the interrupted connection can originate with either the sending server or the receiving server.
This should be temporary problem, and normally only a few copies of the email will be delivered. They can safely be deleted.
Duplicate Email Issue #2
I get multiple copies of every email.
Possible Cause: You might have multiple forwarders set up. Let's say person A is getting the double copies. Perhaps emails to B forward to A and C, while emails to C also forward to A. So A is getting the emails from both B and C.
Possible Solution: Check for forwarders both with us and in any third-party email addresses that you use.
Duplicate Email Issue #3
I get never-ending copies of one email.
Likely cause: The sender's computer never realized it sent the email. This can occur particularly with Outlook and some antivirus software.
Possible Solution: Ask the sender to remove the email from their Sent folder and their queue, and/or to temporarily disable their antivirus to see if that resolves the issue.
Duplicate Email Issue #4
My entire inbox is downloading again.
Possible Cause: You are using a POP connection to the server, and the connection to the server has been reset (the reset can occur anywhere between you and the server, and is most often due to regular maintenance on the email server that includes some type of system reboot). The emails were left on the server rather than being downloaded.
Possible Solution: To stop an in-progress download, take that email account offline, or quit your email application. Next, you will need to clear out older emails from the server so they don't download again when you reconnect. You can do this through webmail. Access your webmail at http://domain.com/webmail/. To keep this from happening in the future, you may be able to either configure your email software to delete messages from the server after a certain period of time (usually an advanced setting), or you may want to switch to using IMAP instead of POP. IMAP always stays in sync with the server, so there's no danger of re-downloading messages.
