How to Auto Delete email in Outlook selectively – Explanation Guide

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. However, some users may want to set Outlook to auto-delete mail for different reasons.

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.

There are people who keep sending you emails that you never want. If you face such an issue, you can set up Microsoft Outlook to automatically delete email messages from certain people (or certain email addresses).

Steps to Auto Delete email in Outlook

Enable rules to automatically delete filtered emails in Microsoft Outlook We will create a rule to automatically delete filtered emails in Microsoft Outlook. 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 the Deleted Items folder. Let’s start.

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  • 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.

You can set up a rule in MS Outlook that will automatically move email messages from selected email addresses to the Deleted Items folder. This way, you will know when unread email messages have been deleted, as MS Outlook will highlight the Deleted Items folder and display the number of unread, deleted emails.

If you’re having trouble creating a rule to auto-delete in Outlook, or if you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments section.

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