Company policy now says nothing older than 3 years stays in the mailbox. I need to wipe everything received before January 1, 2018 across many folders.
Manually scrolling and selecting in each folder is not realistic. What is the efficient way?
Delete all emails before a certain date in Outlook
Solved Email & Outlook
RK
Rachel Kim October 29, 2020
2 replies
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Reviewed by moderators
Two good routes depending on whether this is a one time purge or an ongoing policy.
One time purge, use search. Click into the search box, type received:<01/01/2018 and set the scope dropdown to All Mailboxes or Current Mailbox. When results load, click any result, Ctrl+A to select all, then Shift+Delete to bypass Deleted Items. Do it per folder if you want more control, the search scope dropdown handles that.
Ongoing policy, set AutoArchive to delete instead of archive. File, Options, Advanced, AutoArchive Settings, tick Run AutoArchive every 14 days, set Clean out items older than 36 months and choose Permanently delete old items. This then enforces itself forever without you thinking about it.
On an Exchange or 365 mailbox mention it to your admin too, a retention policy applied server side is cleaner than any client side cleanup and covers webmail and phones as well.
Ran the search purge folder by folder this morning, 41,000 items gone. Set AutoArchive to handle it from here. Mailbox dropped from 22GB to 6GB.