Bulk Deleting All Messages in a Folder in Microsoft Outlook Web Access

Possible Duplicate:
Multiple delete in Microsoft Outlook Web Access

How do you delete all messages in a folder in Outlook, preferrably through Web Access?

I left my Outlook account unattended for several days (on vacation) and when I got back I found several folders with over 5k emails, mostly error logging or spam. When I try to open the Outlook client, it just locks up, presumably unable to download that many emails. I can view at most 100 emails at a time, but I can't select all emails to delete or permanently delete them immediately, so manually deleting this many emails is going to take a while.

Gmail has a similar feature to select and delete all emails in a folder, and that's free so I figure being a quality non-free product from Microsoft, Outlook should have a similar feature (yes that's sarcasm). I've Googled, but I'm not finding anything. Is this possible?

Cerin

Posted 2010-06-09T13:48:09.843

Reputation: 6 081

Answers

UPDATE

Just right click on the desired folder and select Empty Folder

alt text

~~Like dean said, you can hold Ctrl to select single items or even Shift to select multiple items.~~

I haven't used OWA in a long time but a little trick I used to do in Firefox was to use this javascript bit to select all of the checkboxes

javascript:var f=document.activeElement.childNodes1.contentDocument;var c=f.all['MsgID'];var i;for(i=0;i

type it in the address bar and hit enter, it should select all of the checkboxes.

Serge

Posted 2010-06-09T13:48:09.843

Reputation: 598

I'm on a Linux system running Chrome, and right-clicking just opens the browser's context menu. – Ajedi32 – 2015-02-13T19:28:43.063

2Selecting multiple items isn't the problem. Checking the top-most checkbox selects/unselects all on the page. The problem is OWA only shows you a maximum of 100 emails. Javascript can't select emails that aren't listed on the page. – Cerin – 2010-06-09T17:29:52.973

1my bad, updated my original answer – Serge – 2010-06-09T20:55:57.787

2hmm... I'm using outlook 2007 and I don't have that option unless I'm right-clicking the "deleted items" folder. Is there some other way for other folders? If I try to select all messages in a folder using control-a (17,000+ messages) and then right click on the messages or press <delete>, outlook becomes unresponsive. – Brian – 2014-03-17T21:01:11.073

1nvm, control-a, control-d cleared it out. – Brian – 2014-03-17T22:13:19.783

I know that you can hold Control and select the items and then hit the delete button. You could try that.

Dean Perry

Posted 2010-06-09T13:48:09.843

Reputation: 667

While in your inbox, hit Ctrl+A. This will select all messages in your inbox. Do the same in your deleted folder to permanently delete the messages.

Warning! This will delete ALL messages!

Stargirl Randeria

Posted 2010-06-09T13:48:09.843

Reputation: 31

1This does work if you delete (using the delete key, etc.) after you CTRL+A. – Tom Winter – 2017-09-21T13:36:43.790

4Didn't work

– jsj – 2013-01-27T09:31:55.180