Multiple Copies of Emails

[CA Traveler]

On my HP laptop with W7 I get multiple copies of all of the emails in the Inbox on two accounts. Both of these accounts have 5K+ emails. Hotmail through Qwest has only one copy. After setting up the accounts all of the email is downloaded, Later a second copy is downloaded and then a third copy is downloaded. This occurs on both Outlook and Thunderbird. Otherwise the accounts work as expected and all programs are up to date.

A Google search yields various reasons none of which seem to apply. A friend suggested that the problem was due to multiple MAC addresses.

Indeed I travel and have the built in WiFi antenna, a Verizon air card and an external USB WiFi antenna. So could each of these have a different MAC address which causes the multiple downloads?

Regardless I'd like to understand what is causing this situation and how can I stop the multiple downloads.

I've found a nice free Thunderbird addon to delete the multiple emails but if the problem is due to multiple MAC addresses with the extra copies come back? Is there a good free Outlook program to delete multiple emails?

Thunderbird was especially painful as it starts downloading from the oldest message to the newest. Therefore during the many hours of download that account is not usable as I need the latest emails but have to wait for everything to get downloaded.

At least Outlook starts downloading the newest email of the additional copy so I can close it and restart to get even newer emails.

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

[Paul T]

On TB you can set it to download headers only. That will be nice and quick and allow you to work until you sort out the problem.

cheers, Paul