Why would you want to auto-delete mail in Outlook? You know that Microsoft Outlook has a good spam filter that can read email messages as soon as they arrive and categorize them into normal and junk/spam mail. Accordingly, it sends the mail into Inbox or Junk mail folders. With this feature, you may not need to set MS Outlook to auto-delete email messages. Or do you?
Who wants to go to the Junk folder and delete messages one by one – to clean the Junk folder? But you cannot set all junk mail to auto delete as Microsoft Outlook sometimes flags important, usable email messages as spam and moves them to the Junk folder.
But again, there are people who keep on sending you emails that you never want. If you face such an issue, here is how to set up Microsoft Outlook to automatically delete email messages from certain people (or certain email addresses).
Steps to Auto Delete email in Outlook
To enable filtered auto delete in Microsoft Outlook, we will create a rule. This rule will check all the incoming email messages and see the email address the emails are originating from. If the email address matches the one we have set in the rule, Outlook will delete that message instead of moving it into the Junk folder. To delete the message, MS Outlook will move it to Deleted Items folder. Let’s start.
- Open Microsoft Outlook
- In the Inbox or Junk folder, locate the email message from the sender (email address) that you want MS Outlook to delete automatically.
- Click on Rules to open the drop-down menu (Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010).
- Click on the first option that says “Always Move Messages From: xyz”.
- In the dialog box that appears, you will find the list of folders in the PST file of the account that contains the email message to be deleted automatically. Select Deleted Items.
- Click OK
- Repeat steps 1 to 6 to create rules for other email addresses.
This creates a rule that auto deletes (or moves to Deleted Items) email messages from selected email addresses. When the unread email messages are automatically moved to Deleted Items folder, you will know it as MS Outlook will highlight the Deleted Items folder and display the number of unread, deleted emails.
If you face any difficulty creating the rule to auto-delete in Outlook or have any questions, feel free to ask using the comments section.
Now read: Outlook Attachment Cleanup Tool cleans out Email file attachment leftovers, traces.
