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RFloyd30

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Import PST to O365 without duplicates

in doing a on premise exchange to Office 365 hosted exchange I setup the Office 365 environment and then forwarded the on premise inbound email to both on premise and O365 boxes until time of conversion, about 5 days.  Then I proceeded to go ahead and export the on premise email.  Then when it was time for conversion, I did another export with a date range getting the week that I was forwarding.  The reason I did this was to get the email that was replied to, read, or otherwise dealt with during the 5 days of forwarding.

So now that the conversion is done, I connect to the O365 mailbox and then import that 5 days of email, choosing to replace duplicate items.  My assumption was that if an email had been read and replied to, the import would over write the unread version that had been forwarded and import the sent one in sent items.
It did import the emails but it duplicated them - I had a ton of emails that were read and then unread - exact emails.

is there a way to import these and over write the unread one in the inbox?

Thanks
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RFloyd30

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Nice, thank you...  I will look into the migration utility.  Some of these did not work in the past so I have not revisited them.  For example the PST upload tool.  I started it yesterday and did a small test first and found that the import worked.  But it put the entire imported mailbox under the Inbox so no I have to move all the mail to the appropriate folder(s) plus I don't think it did anything with calendar and contacts.  I believe in the CSV you can use a simple / for location and it does it from the "top" level.  But testing will have to be done.

I will try the script for sure and read up on the migration tool.

Thank you both for suggestions!

Take care,
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a little off subject of the post, but thanks anyway.  The migration is good to go.  I do tons of these.  I really wanted to know why the Outlook import, when choosing "do not create duplicates," does so.  I thought it might be an attribute such as "read" or "unread" but today I find that it does not matter, the import duplicated them no matter what state they were in.  Odd.
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I appreciate all the input.  The problem is simple but still no explanation.  Most wanted to tell me how to import the mail from on premise exchange to O365.  That was not the question.

The question is why when importing a PST and you tell it to "REPLACE DUPLICATES WITH Import" it DOES NOT.
For example, I import an archive to O365.  Done on that and it works.  But the cutover is a few days later and in my case I've forwarded the on premise email to the O365 email box.  So for those few days, the same email in the on premise mailbox is in the O365 mailbox.  Since the user was using the on premise email, they have opened, replied and done whatever to the emails.  But in the O365 mailbox, they are sitting there unread.  So if I export those few days to a PST, I want to import those to the O365 mailbox (after the cutover) and OVERWRITE.  So if john doe sent an email to this user and it was replied to, the email is read and a message is in the sent folder.  I wanted to import to replace the inbox email with it being read and import the reply in the sent folder.

Yes my bad for not using the O365 migration tool to keep the email boxes in sync.  But the question is why the Outlook Import does not replace?  Since this is a small exported PST I am simply doing the import from Outlook client itself.

Thanks again for the time and replies!!!
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The problem is " the cutover is a few days later"... and the migration tool is not that smart to compare all your emails on a one-to-one basis or it will take a very very long time to do the migration.

So, the principle is to take a definite cutover date so that only the emails on or before the cutover date will be migrated to o365.
My fault for not explaining better.  We are past this migration now and all is good.  Not a high volume email firm compared to others so manually deleting the duplicates was fairly easy.
But yes, we used Outlook to import the small PST and did it logged in as the user who owned the mailbox.  
Going forward, I think I will use the migration tool early before the cut over weekend and allow the O365 tool to import the large PSTs into the mailboxes.  Then do a export via date range at time of cutover to get the email period without the forwarding of email.  This should solve the issue.
Also will look at the migration tool that will keep the mailboxes in sync.
Thanks to all for contribution to this.  No matter how long you do this job, there is always something to learn and I thank you for your time and input!
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