Faster Remove Duplicate SQL

I have a table containing over 100,000 email addresses. This email table gets duplicates in it, and our customers don't want a second (or third or fourth) copy of our news letter. To prevent this, we run the following SQL to kill the duplicates:





Code Snippet

DELETE FROM _email WHERE _email.eid IN
(
SELECT tbl1.eid FROM _email AS tbl1 WHERE Exists
(
SELECT emailaddress, Count(eid) FROM _email WHERE _email.emailaddress = tbl1.emailaddress GROUP BY _email.emailaddress HAVING Count(_email.eid) > 1
)
)
AND _email.eid NOT IN
(
SELECT Min(eid) FROM _email AS tbl1 WHERE Exists
(
SELECT emailaddress, Count(eid) FROM _email WHERE _email.emailaddress = tbl1.emailaddress GROUP BY _email.emailaddress HAVING Count(_email.eid) > 1
)
GROUP BY emailaddress
);
This query takes about 2hrs to run which is really hurting our server preformance. Is there any way to do this faster?

I am running SQL Server 2000

Thanks in advance