Tips on Cleaning Up Your Mailbox
Deleting Emails
We have asked you to clean up the excess mail in your mailbox. Easy to say, but it can be a daunting task upon first glance. We understand. Below are some tools and tips on how to deal with and solve the problem.
Before we can start deleting emails we need to go back to the very beginning of when you first started receiving email. In your inbox you will a scroll wheel on the righthand side that allows you to…well…scroll through your email. It looks like the picture below. Grab that box and slide it down all the way to the bottom,
Now depending on how long you have been here and how much mail you have, you will most likely not be able to go all the way back to when you first started receiving email. If you can then great! Skip ahead. However, most of you will most likely see a message that looks like this:
Click that item and eventually it will show every piece of email you have ever received. Once again grab that scroll wheel box and scroll all the way to the bottom. You should now be looking at your very first emails or at least the oldest ones that you have not yet deleted.
Now there is many ways to go about this next step. You can single click one time on your first email and just start repeatedly hitting the delete key on your keyboard. Do not hold the delete key down though as it’ll start deleting very fast not giving you a chance to see what it is you are deleting. You can right click on every single email and choose “Delete” repeatedly. You can even hover your mouse pointer over the email and click on the red “x” one by one. However, I will show you some tricks to start deleting large chunks much faster.
Single click one time on your oldest email and then hold down the “Shift” key on your keyboard. While holding down the shift key you can repeatedly press the up arrow on your keyboard to start highlighting emails. If you have gone back years and plan to start deleting large chunks just hold down the up arrow for a few seconds to see that large chunk of emails are getting highlighted. Periodically take your hands off the keyboard and hit the delete key which will then delete all the selected emails.
You may also select an email, scroll up or down a bit, and then hold down the shift key before clicking on another email. This will then select all the emails in between these two which you can then delete. Repeat these steps for all the email you wish to delete. These steps can(and should) be repeated for your “Junk Email”, “Sent Items”, and other folders. Some of these folders are holding duplicate copies of your emails and all of them are taking up space in your Outlook.
Whichever method you choose once you are finished you will then need to right-click on the “Deleted Items” box that’s below your inbox and sent items and select “Empty Folder”. Just deleting your email is not enough as it will just sit in your deleted items forever still taking up space and slowing down your Outlook.
Saving Attachments
The biggest culprit in large mailboxes are the attachments that are…well…attached to your emails. One attachment alone can be bigger than hundreds of emails. You want to delete the email and its corresponding attachment to free up space but do not want to lose the file, so you just keep it in your Outlook. Here I will describe how to save that attachment to your PC or U: drive thereby letting you delete the email.
In the email that has the attachment all you need to do is right-click on the attachment and choose “Save As” or “Save All Attachments”. A dialog box will open asking where you would like to save the file. Choose a spot on your computer/u: drive/or shared folder and save it. You can now safely delete the email whilst retaining the attachment.