How To Delete All Emails in Outlook

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.

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

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:

Click on the Folder located on the left side

Expand the folder pane. You can do this by clicking on the arrow located at the top left corner of the pane.

Right-click on the folder’s name

Within the folder pane, right-click on the folder where you want the emails removed, then go to Delete All.

Confirm deletion

Confirm the removal by clicking ‘Yes’ when prompted.

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:

Highlight Using the ‘Shift’ Key

If you want to delete multiple consecutive emails, go to the message list and click the first one. Then, while holding the Shift key on your keyboard, click on the last email that you want to delete. Once all the emails are selected, hit the Delete

For non-consecutive emails, click the first one that you want to delete, hold the Ctrl (on PC) key or the CMD key on Mac, and select every email you want to be removed one at the time. Once you’ve selected all of them, press the Delete

Highlight Using ‘Select All’

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 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 emails from the same sender in an easy way. Here’s what to do:

Tap in the search box in the upper right-hand corner then type the name of the sender

Use CTRL + A or CMD + A to select all

Click on any of the emails and hit Ctrl + A to select all of them.

Click ‘Delete’

Right-click on any of the selected emails and click ‘Delete.’

Delete All Junk Emails

One thing that can fill up quickly is your “Junk” folder. Fortunately, Outlook makes it simple to purge this data.

Right-Click the email account

Click ‘Empty Junk Folder’ and click ‘Delete.’

Delete an Email Account from Outlook

If you’re looking to clear up some space in Outlook you can remove an entire email address and all of its storage. Assuming you no longer use the address you’re going to delete, follow these instructions:

Click ‘File’ and click ‘Account Settings’

Mac users can right-click the email account on the left side of Outlook above ‘Inbox’

Click ‘Delete’ on the account for removal

Mac users will need to click the minus symbol in the bottom left.

Confirm deletion

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 the bulk delete.