This has been driving me crazy forever. As soon as IMAP became available for Gmail some time back, I immediately went about hooking it up to Outlook so that I could access Gmail along with my other five plus other email accounts from one central interface.

And there was much rejoicing.

Except for the fact that all of my outgoing messages seemed to get saved twice into my Sent folder. This is pretty annoying, but not a show stopper. Like any good geek, I ignored the problem. For well over a year.

Finally today it dawned on me that both Outlook and Gmail could be saving copies into my Sent folder. Turning this off in Outlook (Tools -> Options -> E-mail Options… -> un-check “Save copies of messages in Sent Items folder”) reveals that, indeed, my lightning quick powers of deduction are sharper than ever. Problem solved.

Now perhaps in six months I will deduce a way to remove ten gigabytes of duplicate messages.