Deleting multiple emails can be easy, or it can be really, really cumbersome.
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I have over 15,000 emails. How do I delete multiple emails without having to delete them one at a time?
Two factors determine which it’s going to be: your criteria for which emails you want to delete, and the capabilities of your email program.
While I can’t show you what works in every email program or interface, I’ll review a couple of common techniques that will make this easier. Those techniques are useful for more than just deleting email, and they work in arenas other than email as well.
Lengthen the display list
Several of the techniques we’ll look at below work best if you maximize the number of emails listed on your screen at one time. Not all email programs or services give you this control (most notably Outlook.com as of this writing), but many do (like Gmail).
In the General tab of Gmail settings is a setting called “Maximum page size”:
Many email programs have similar settings: they control how many messages are listed at once before you have to click to see the next page. When you’re dealing with a lot of messages, it’s nice to be able to have as many on the screen as possible at a time.
Check your email program or service to see if that setting is available, and consider setting it to something large. We’ll see in a moment why that’s handy.
Multiple-selection techniques
One of Windows’ basic concepts is selection. Click on something — like a message in a list — and it’s selected (and often highlighted). Also basic is the concept of multiple selection — the ability to select more than one thing at a time. Let’s look at how each works.
Given these selection techniques, you have three approaches to deleting multiple emails.
One handy shortcut: typing CTRL+a means “select all”, and all messages visible in the list would be selected. You can then CTRL-click to unselect specific messages, leaving the remaining selected.
Checkbox selection
Many web-based interfaces don’t use click, CTRL-click, and SHIFT-click the way I’ve described above. Instead, they include a checkbox in front of each item. You can check the checkbox for each item you want to act on, and then click on Delete to delete the checked items.
In almost all cases, there’s also an extra checkbox as part of the list header. In Outlook.com, it looks like this:
Click on that, and all the messages displayed will be selected. Note that, again in Outlook.com, the individual message icons have been converted into individual selection checkboxes.
Sorting techniques
In most email programs, if you click on a column header, the program will sort the items by that column:
Typically, clicking on the header sorts items in one direction, and clicking on it again sorts it in the other. In most cases, any column that can be displayed in an email (or many other) program’s list view can be used to sort the list.
Occasionally, web email interfaces use a menu or other option to indicate how their displayed list should be sorted:
Why do I focus on sorting so much? Because it makes what we’re about to do not just easy, but possible.
Combine sorting and multiple selection to delete multiple emails
Let’s say you want to delete all email from a particular person. The process combines what I’ve shown you so far.
If the list of email from that person is short enough to display on a single page, then you’re done. If not, you may need to repeat this a few times, depending on how many messages there are and how many can be displayed per page.
This technique works for any criteria that you can sort for:
Even better, this technique works for more than just deleting. You might use it to:
Advanced filtering techniques: Gmail
As one might expect from Google, Gmail has a very powerful search interface. That search can be used to automatically select and then act on almost any criteria you can think of.
Let’s say you want to delete all the mails from a specific sender. Swiftshader 4.0 full version. First, search for that sender in Gmail’s search.
Gmail displays all the messages that meet that criteria (up to the number of messages configured to be displayed per page).
Click on the select-all checkbox:
If you have more than a page-worth of matching results, Gmail will display a line:
All 20 conversations on this page are selected. Select all conversations that match this search
Click on the “Select all conversations that match” link to do exactly that. Not much will change, other than the text, which becomes:
All conversations in this search are selected. Clear selection
The key is that all conversations that match what you search for are selected, even those not displayed on your screen.
Click Delete, and they’ll all be deleted. Or click on any other action to apply that action to all the selected messages.
This approach can be used for any searchable criteria in Gmail.
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Video Narration
With millions of users around the globe, Outlook is one of the most popular email clients out there. The reason for this is that it’s so much more than an email platform. There are many options for organizing the users’ professional life as well.
Also see our article How To Automatically Forward an E-mail in Outlook
With time, your Outlook inbox is bound to get cluttered. This makes it much harder to navigate through your mail and find the most important information. Even though Outlook comes equipped with functions that can make this easier, they’re often not enough to compensate for the lack of clarity in your inbox.
When this happens, you’ll want to organize your mail the best way you can. Thankfully, there are several ways of deleting multiple categories of unnecessary mail, and even to delete all of it. Let’s go over the available options.
Deleting All Mail from a Folder
Quick Links
If you want to remove emails from a specific folder, there’s a fairly easy way of doing it. Here are the steps that you need to follow:
Keep in mind that this doesn’t remove the emails entirely. Instead, it just moves them to the Deleted Items folder. If your main goal is to organize Outlook a bit better, this should be enough. However, if you’re looking to free up some space, you’ll have to empty the Deleted Items folder.
To do this, navigate to the folder using the folder pane, right-click on it, then go to Empty Folder. When you’re asked to confirm the removal, click Yes.
Deleting Multiple Emails from a Folder
If you think there are still some important emails in a folder that you’d better keep, you can delete multiple emails in that folder at once, that is, the unnecessary ones. Here’s how to do it:
If you want to select all your emails, you can press Ctrl + A. If you mistakenly select an email that you don’t want to delete, you can unselect it by holding the Ctrl key and clicking on it.
Deleting All Mails from Your Inbox
If you only want to have a clear inbox, there’s an easy way to remove all messages at once. Here’s what to do.
Deleting All Mails from the Same Sender
Sometimes, removing the mail from a handful of senders can make a world of difference to your inbox. Outlook allows you to remove all mails from the same sender in an easy way. Here’s what to do:
The Final Word
As you can see, there’s a variety of things you can do to organize your Outlook. In just a couple of clicks, you can get rid of all the emails that you won’t need anymore, such that you can better focus on the more important emails.
If you run out of storage, don’t forget to empty the Deleted Items folder. This is the only way to remove the emails permanently, which you should probably do every time you perform a bulk delete.
You can delete email messages from your inbox in just a few steps. Delete an email
If you're using a mobile browser, swipe left on a message to delete it. Delete all email from your inbox
If you're using a mobile browser, press and hold a message to select it, tap Select All at the top of the screen, and select the trash icon to delete all selected messages. Empty your Outlook.com Deleted ItemsTo empty your Deleted Items folder:
If you're using a mobile browser, press and hold a message to select it, tap Select All at the top of the screen, and select the trash icon to delete all selected messages. To permanently purge all of your Deleted Items you need to also delete all of your recoverable items:
Note: You can't access the recoverable items folder if you're using a mobile browser. To access the recoverable items folder, please use a PC or Mac.
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