thanks.... I came up with the following solution to this problem:

If you want to synch your Outlook at home, on a notebook, or setup a new
computer with your PST file from work, do the following:

1. Do a send/receive from your work computer to update your email
2. Delete previous copies of your mail on the server. Go to: Tools,
account settings, change, more settings, advanced, uncheck “leave a copy on
server.”
3. After the previous copies have been deleted from the server, repeat step
(2), but check “leave a copy on server” in order to keep copies of your email
on the server on a go-forward basis.
4. Copy your work PST file to your external drive
5. Copy your work PST file to the PST file used on your home computer.
This file should be the same location and name of the file used at work. You
can check the current setting by going to tools, options, data files. If you
need to change it, close Outlook, and move the file using a file manager and
give it the correct name. When you re-open Outlook, it will prompt you to
browse for the correct location of the PST file.
6. Now your Outlook at home will be the same as your Outlook at work for the
time being, and you can follow this process to periodically synch your files.
If interested, there are also add-in packages that give you more robust
synching capabilities.

- Outlook tracks the email messages received by your mail account using the
UIDL list. If you don’t delete your prior messages from the server (step 2
above), then when you copy your work PST file to your home PST file,
Outlook’s UIDL list will be stale, and it will download to your home PST file
any email messages that are on the server. You will then end up with a bunch
of duplicate email messages. You can download add-ins that will clean up
duplicate messages.
- You can also use this same approach to setup or update a notebook computer.
- If you run into problems with your Outlook account at home, it’s easy to
go to the profile, delete the old one, and create a new one with clean
settings

- One other word of caution. If you setup a new account or profile on your
computer, the default setting for “leave a copy on server” is not checked.
In order to work around this problem, you can setup your account and
temporarily use incorrect settings for incoming and outgoing mail; otherwise,
it will immediately start receiving mail before you have time to change this
setting. Check the box for” leave a copy on the server,” and then fix the
incoming and outgoing settings. Then you can receive your mail and leave a
copy on the server.



"Brian Tillman [MVP - Outlook]" wrote:

"big_d" wrote in message
...

The emails intially looked fine, but
then outlook downloaded my emails (that had already been received) from the
last 2 weeks. I leave a copy of emails on our ISP server for 2 weeks. I
now
have multiple copies of emails in my inbox at home. How can I avoid the
duplicative downloading of email messages.

It should happen only once. Each Outlook keeps track of what it has
downloaded. That data is not kept in the PST, so transferring the PST won't
let the second Outlook know what the first has downloaded. There are
duplicate removers he http://www.slipstick.com/addins/mail_duplicates.asp
--
Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]