"Deduplicator" may be doing something very strange (with Pipedrive)

For the past nine months, I have been struggling with a problem related to Pipedrive, which is an online CRM system. I always assumed that there was a problem with Pipedrive, but now I am not so sure. I have spent hours with them, sending screenshots, email headers, and various kinds of information about the emails. Here is the problem I am experiencing:

Pipedrive also accesses my imap account and display incoming emails just like eMclient. It is the same mail box.. It is then able to sort them (as copies) between customers and deals within its own database, completely independently of eMClient or my email server.

I love this program. It is excellent for managing customers and projects.

However, I often find emails present in eMClient that are not present in the Pipedrive inbox.

Since Pipedrive never actually deletes an email from my Pipedrive inbox unless I specifically instruct it to do so, all emails should remain present in the Pipedrive inbox. When I delete them in Pipedrive they also are deleted in the eMClient mail box like they should. Likewise when I delete them in eMClient. So far so good.

I never delete and subsequently restore emails in eMClient. Once deleted I want them to remain deleted.

The Pipedrive team has investigated the emails that are still on my email server and that are not appearing in Pipedrive and has informed me of the following. It appears that the emails are being marked as deleted on the server but they believe that I have restored them from my eMClient trash folder. Pipedrive sees them as being deleted but restored. And as a result does not show them in my Pipedrive inbox. We have gone in and marked these “deleted but restored” emails as NOT DELETED and then they reappear in Pipedrive.

The only remaining item on my list to check is the deduplication function in Pipedrive.

What I believe might be happening when I run the deduplication function in EMClient is that EMClient marks all duplicates as deleted and then restores one of them. I just ran the deduplication function in EM Client and immediately saw all duplicate items disappear from Pipedrive. Meanwhile, in the EM Client, only one copy remains.

Therefore, it appears to be related to this function.

If this is true, then it must be some sort of bug in the deduplication function of EM Client. The answer is to never deduplicate your emails. Unfortunately, I receive so many duplicates that I have to do it periodically. If not, I will have to waste a great deal of time each day manually reviewing and deleting duplicates. I would really like to continue using this function, but if it causes these kinds of problems, I cannot.

Does anyone else have this problem? Is it a known issue?

Thank you very much for your help.

After a week of not deduplicating, which is somewhat tedious because I have to delete many more emails manually, I have not encountered the problem again. It appears that the deduplication function in EMClient has a problem.

You would expect it to simply remove duplicates and leave one email intact in its entirety. However, it appears that the remaining email has been marked as deleted on the server and then reloaded into the IMAP account. This means that anyone (me) accessing that server may receive a notification that the email has been deleted and, as a result, it may not be displayed.

I am not certain whether this is a bug, but it appears to be one to me.

The issue does seem to be with eMClient’s deduplication function. When you deduplicate emails, eMClient might mark them as deleted and then restore one, which Pipedrive doesn’t always recognize correctly. This could explain why emails disappear from Pipedrive but remain in eMClient.

Unfortunately, if deduplication is causing this, avoiding it might be the best short-term solution. I get that manually handling duplicates can be time-consuming, though.

Indeed, I have stopped using it, and of course, it is a bit annoying. Perhaps this can be added to the to-do list to be resolved. Possibly, Pipedrive is the only application that considers the delete flag when synchronizing with IMAP. It may be the only program, but I suspect there are others. Therefore, I believe it is worth noting, and if anyone encounters this problem, they will find it in this thread.

Thank you for your feedback.