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1.  You are part of multiple distribution groups and the email duplicates are legitimate

2.  Email from other email accounts in the system are being forwarded to you, so email duplicates are legitimate

3.  You legitimately received the message twice

4.  A corrupt email message (usually spam) is in your inbox and is causing your email downloads to not complete

5.  Your internet connection is slow and is timing out or the email you are downloading is too big

6.  CDS is having problems with their internet access speeds or equipment

The most common reason someone receives duplicates is that they are part of a distribution group (or multiple groups).   When a user sends email to the distribution group or groups, it will send to each person within each group.  If you are within each of those groups, then you will legitimately receive those emails for each group you are part of.

Example: You are part of the sales team and you are also part of the management staff, so your local IT person adds you to the sales@yourdomain.com and management@yourdomain.com distribution groups.  The IT person plans on taking the servers down on Saturday and wants to notify everyone within the company, so they send the system downtime message to both distribution groups.  In this scenario, while it would appear that you got a duplicate, since you are part of both groups you would receive this notification twice.

To have your email administrator check the distribution lists, contact our office for assistance.

Another common reason for duplicates is email forwarding.  This often occurs when someone changes position within the company or leaves the company altogether.  The IT person will normally forward emails directed to that address to the new person replacing that individual.

Example: Jane leaves the company.  You replace Jane and takeover her duties. The IT person forwards all incoming email going to Jane’s email address into your account.  A few days after this change has taken place, the IT person sends out a broadcast message to all users in the company.  Because Jane’s email address still exists as its own account, when the IT person sends out the broadcast message, you will receive it twice; once because it was directed to your email address and once because it was directed to Jane’s email address, which was then forwarded to you.

To have your email administrator check to see what email accounts are being forwarded to your account, contact our office for assistance.

As silly as it sounds, people often send multiple emails with the same content.  They can also hit ‘reply to all’, and forget to remove your email address from the CC or BCC field.  When it is a long list of email addresses, they might have forgotten that they already added you to the list.  Unfortunately, there are too many reasons to list, because are multiple ways this can occur.  The best thing to do is check the email fields to see if you are listed multiple times or check with the user to see if they sent it multiple times.

For instructions on how to check to see if the sender included your email address twice, contact our office for assistance.

The format of emails and the transmission protocols developed for email is a very old technology.  There are a few design problems with downloading email that spammers can exploit that can cause errors.  By crafting an email that is partially complete (enough that it will transmit, but not enough to process), it can confuse your email program and it will stop in the middle of downloading your emails.  It then has to start over.  This is how it works…

Example: You have 10 new emails within your inbox on the server.  You open Outlook and start downloading your email, but it stops on the 6^th email message.  Later, your email program tries downloading the messages again.  At this point, there might be 12 messages to download.  It starts downloading the messages and starts with the first message again but fails on the 6^th message again.  So it creates triplicates of the first 5 messages. 

The reason this happens is because the standards email was developed against indicate that the client machine should download all of the messages, and then report to the server that it did this successfully.  Until it gets to the end, it doesn’t tell the server that it got the first 5 messages.  So, the next time it downloads emails, the server still thinks the email program needs all of the messages, when it really only needs the ones it hasn’t downloaded yet.

To fix this problem, contact our office for assistance.

If your internet connection is slow, your email program will timeout while downloading your email.  The result is the same as described above with corrupt emails.  Your email program must get to the end of all of the emails it needs to download to tell the server that any of the email downloads were successful.  It’s all or nothing.  So, if it stops in the middle of downloading emails, it will start over from the beginning the next scheduled download time creating duplicates of what has already been downloaded.  This can also occur if you get an email that is very large.  The larger the email, the longer the transmission; which creates more opportunity for a timeout to occur.

Example: You have 10 new emails within your inbox on the server.  You open Outlook and start downloading your email, but it stops on the 6^th email message because the connection to the server times out.  Later, your email program tries downloading the messages again.  At this point, there might be 12 messages to download.  It starts downloading the messages and starts with the first message again let’s say it times out on the 3^rd message.  So it would have 2 copies of the first 3 message and 1 copy of the 4^th and 5^th message.  That’s because it downloaded the first 5 messages one time, and then downloaded the first 3 messages the second time before failing. 

The reason this happens is because the standards email was developed against indicate that the client machine should download all of the messages, and then report to the server that it did this successfully.  Until it gets to the end, it doesn’t tell the server that it got the first 5 messages.  So, the next time it downloads emails, the server still thinks the email program needs all of the messages, when it really only needs the ones it hasn’t downloaded yet.

While we might not be able to fix your internet speed or connection issues, there are some settings that will extend the timeout period and may help.  If you receive a large email, there are other ways to download this email to cleanup your account on the server.  To make setting changes, download email, or check the internet connection speeds from your computer, contact our office for assistance.

Although rare (the less often the better), we do have problems with our equipment and internet providers.  In this event, if you feel it could be our issue, it is best to contact our office.  Although we have monitoring equipment, the software isn’t perfect and it isn’t possible to catch all problems.  We don’t always know where there is a problem, so we greatly appreciate users notifying us when they think our systems are not performing properly.  For assistance with checking our internet connection speed, or to check if CDS is having problems, contact our office.