Email Management: Tips to clean up your Outlook mailbox

Do you open your Outlook to find 100s of emails? Not sure where to start?

Try using these amazing Email Management options to help clean up your Outlook mailbox, automatically delete emails that are not relevant to you and reduce the amount of emails in your Inbox.

Clean up

Outlook has several Conversation Clean Up options. These remove the threads of the email from your Mailbox but keeps the latest one in the chain. This latest email will have all the replies as part of the content anyway, so why do you need the others?

The cleaned-up emails will be in your Deleted Items folder if you have a change of heart.

Clean Up Folder and Subfolder

I use this one every morning, after lunch or when I’m back from being out of the office. It works great to clear up all my emails and free up the mailbox.

Select an email in your Inbox to clean up all your Outlook mailbox including all your folders. Then you can focus on the emails that are current rather reading an earlier reply.

Clean Up Conversation

This one is useful if you feel the previous option is too ruthless! This will clean up the conversation thread for the selected email only.

Clean Up Folder

This will clean up the conversation thread for the folder of the selected email, for example, if you have selected an email in your Inbox, this option will clean up all the emails in your Inbox only.

Clean Up Settings

There are several settings available if you want to control what gets Cleaned Up when using the options above.

• To modify the settings, Click File.

• Select Options and then Mail.

• Scroll down to Conversation Clean Up.

• Modify the settings to your choosing, for example, prevent unread messages from being deleted.

Fed-up with Replay All emails?

Do you get fed up with people constantly clicking Reply All to an email that has no relevance to you?

Using the Ignore option on the selected email will delete it and will send all future replies to your Deleted Items folder. If you’re worried, you’re missing out, you can always dip into the Deleted Items folder to see the replies.

Switching Off Email Notifications

This option doesn’t clean up your mailbox but by switching off the new email notifications this can help to avoid distractions.

This option is great when you need to focus on work for a pressing deadline. You can then check the emails when you’re ready, if the query is urgent the person can always phone you. This option is also useful when you’re sharing your screen for a presentation or demo.

• Click File and select Options.

• Click Mail and then scroll to the Message arrival section.

• Deselect Play a sound, Show an envelope icon in the taskbar and Display a Desktop Alert.

• Click OK to complete.

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