outlook email WEB? No way to search and delete ALL emails from someone?

sdowney717 · Feb 27, 2025

I was wanting to mass delete say 1000 emails from some particular place.
Is there some way to do it in one go? Rather than select and click 75 at a time.

I did find I can right click inbox and empty the entire inbox, thereby destroying the account and usefulness of outlook web for any purpose.
I have 26,000 mostly useless emails.

Should I abandon Outlook and start over with something else? As right now it is pretty useless.
And I was wondering if MSFT will stop working if it gets too full

garlin · Feb 27, 2025

Are talking about Outlook.com or OWA (Outlook Web Access)?

The typical answer is to search an unique term (sender, domain, etc.). Click the "Check all" square box in the top left header of the messages pane. Now depending on how positive you are about selecting the right search terms:

1. Delete all the selected mails. Now.

2. Move them to a newly created folder. Browse folder to confirm there's no false positives (other mail accidentally swept up). Delete the folder.

sdowney717 · Feb 27, 2025

WEB MAIL outlook.com. I hate how MS does not distinguish outlook better

sdowney717 · Feb 27, 2025

garlin said:
Are talking about Outlook.com or OWA (Outlook Web Access)?

The typical answer is to search an unique term (sender, domain, etc.). Click the "Check all" square box in the top left header of the messages pane. Now depending on how positive you are about selecting the right search terms:

1. Delete all the selected mails. Now.

2. Move them to a newly created folder. Browse folder to confirm there's no false positives (other mail accidentally swept up). Delete the folder.

When you do that, max I can delete in one operation is 75 emails. That is why I started this thread. I want to delete all at once on a search term.

So, when you delete 75 items, they go and another 75 load, delete 75, and another 75 appear. etc.... I have way too many junky emails from forums and websites that I get spammed with now for years, and they add up to tens of thousands. And it has made the account about worthless, too hard to use.

Is there some other way to access the email account with a better program?

garlin · Feb 27, 2025

1. Create a new rule.

2. Some other mail clients will connect to Outlook.com accounts.
POP, IMAP, and SMTP settings for Outlook.com - Microsoft Support

sdowney717 · Feb 27, 2025

Ok giving it a go. Created a rule to delete Subway emails. It ran 556 in a minute putting them into deleted items folder.
Emptying the deleted items is running for 5 minutes now. Why does it take so long?

sdowney717 · Feb 27, 2025

Still running that rule.
If I cancel, will it restore all the deleted emails?
I think it is stuck.
I vaguely recall doing this before and it gets stuck. I saw I already have a bunch of rules I setup years ago.

garlin · Feb 27, 2025

Cancelling a rule leaves your mailbox in whatever state it's currently in. It doesn't undo whatever progress was made before cancellation.

garlin · Feb 27, 2025

I forgot to mention, the old Hotmail team created Outlook.com's Sweep feature.
Organize your inbox with Archive, Sweep, and other tools in Outlook on the web - Microsoft Support

Sweep is a way to continue subscribing to mailing lists, but automatically remove older mails on a periodic basis. You get the benefit of having the mail available if you suddenly wanted to see it, but without having to clean the mailbox periodically.

sdowney717 · Feb 27, 2025

garlin said:
Cancelling a rule leaves your mailbox in whatever state it's currently in. It doesn't undo whatever progress was made before cancellation.

It is stuck and its been hours, time to cancel

sdowney717 · Feb 27, 2025

This is a serious productivity killer.

I cancelled and doing Motley Fool now

sdowney717 · Feb 27, 2025

I don't know, but it's not doing anything, claims it is running. I recall this issue from several years ago, and I sort of think I gave up back then trying to clear the email out.

Maybe sign out and sign in again?

sdowney717 · Feb 27, 2025

cancelling it, will close tab and retry

sdowney717 · Feb 27, 2025

This is awful! It moved 241 to deleted folder. So I try to delete them all and it is greyed out.

Few minutes later look and see it is deleting them. Very Very Slow

Again stuck and halted on the last one

Hazel123 · Feb 27, 2025

I just put the sender name in the search box at the top, then in the search box menu, select inbox. And hit return - it should come up with most, if not all the emails from that person and you can select them all with one click and delete. I say most because sometimes business senders use slightly different email address formats.

If you don't select anything from the drop down then it'll find all emails to and from that sender, from every folder (including the deleted folder!).

Hazel123 · Feb 27, 2025

sdowney717 · Feb 28, 2025

I found out part of the problem with rules, is they are extremely slow to run.
I just created a rule to move all emails from 'Trawler Forum' to deleted items.
I ran the rule.

Then went to deleted items and it won't let me empty the folder, 'greyed out'
While I am looking at the folder, it slowly fills up one by one. like 1 per second. I may have 1000 emails from Trawler forum.
1000 seconds is 16 minutes to do that rule.

antspants · Feb 28, 2025

If you’re sick of blaming Outlook yet, why don’t you just install Thunderbird temporarily and use it to add your account and clean up.

But it sounds to me that you might have bigger problems than Outlook by the looks of the time it’s taking

garlin · Feb 28, 2025

Web-based e-mail is offered because it's portable. All you need is a browser, especially if you're without your personal PC or smartphone at your side.

The drawback is performance is abysmal. Whether we're talking about Outlook.com (which is the rebranded Hotmail) or OWA (Outlook Web Access) running on a hosted mail server. Having a local e-mail client like Outlook app, Thunderbird or anything that does rules-based logic is more convenient and faster for sorting out messages for deletion.

antspants · Feb 28, 2025

I’m curious, when did Microsoft limit the amount of emails displayed on outlook .com to 75? You might only be able to see about 50 at a time depending on your monitor but if you keep scrolling, all 1000 should be there.

I’ve never had that problem in the past

Ctrl + A then delete

outlook email WEB? No way to search and delete ALL emails from someone?

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