Outlook Inbox Deleting an Email

You will not want to keep every email you receive. You can organize your emails into folders, but there will be some that you need to delete. If you do not delete unnecessary emails, such as an invitation to lunch, your Outlook email count will be very large, and can cause some issues. When you delete an email it goes into the "Deleted Items" Outlook folder. You can press Control y and arrow to the "Deleted Items" folder, hit Enter one time, and then either retrieve an email you accidentally deleted, or delete it one more time to be sure it is completely gone. All you need to do to delete an email in the Inbox, folder, even the "Deleted Items" folder, is to arrow to that email and hit the Delete key on your 6-Pac keys (bottom left key). Do the following activity to practice deleting unnecessary emails. When you are finished, move to the link titled "BACK" at the bottom of this page to go to the "Outlook Lessons" web page.

1. Open Outlook.

2. Down arrow through the Inbox until you hear an email that you do not want.

3. Hit the Delete key on the 6-Pac (bottom left key) one time and the email is sent to the "Deleted Items" folder. If you accidentally hit the Delete key more than one time, the email under the email you wanted to delete, will also be deleted. If you do this you can always use Control y and down arrow to go to the "Deleted Items" Outlook folder and retrieve the email.

4. Find a group of emails that are sequenced directly to each other. Press and hold down the Shift key and down arrow to highlight those email.

5. Hit the Delete key one time and all highlighted emails are deleted.

6. Move to the first email you want to delete, press and hold down the Control key, down arrow to the next email you want to delete, hit the Spacebar one time, and you have highlighted non sequenced emails and are ready to delete them.

7. Hit the Delete key one time and the highlighted emails in "6" above will be deleted.

8. If you decided that you want to delete all emails in the "Deleted Items" Outlook folder, Control y, down arrow to the "Deleted Items" folder, hit Enter one time, press Control a to highlight all of the emails in the folder and then hit the Delete key one time. All of the emails are gone forever!

9. Practice the above steps until you are quick and accurate. You may need to email yourself, or have friends email you so that you can practice deleting emails.

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