Although many people consider Outlook to be a little older than other email clients, there are still millions who use it daily. This is especially true for businesses, as Outlook offers a variety of features that help employees stay organized.
Whether you’re using Outlook for personal or professional reasons, there’s a high chance that you don’t read every email you receive. Over time, you’ve probably accumulated hundreds and thousands of promotions, spam, and other unimportant emails.
Microsoft has designed Outlook in such a way that it is very easy to use, so it is not difficult to clean your folders of a ton of unread emails. There are a few ways to get rid of them, so let’s take a look at what they are.
Using the Search Feature to Delete Unread Emails
The usefulness of the search feature in Outlook goes beyond simply searching for specific emails. It can help you delete all emails from a specific folder that are in the search category. Is that how it works:
- from the main Mail view, navigate to the folder from which you want to delete all your unread emails. It can be any folder, not just your inbox.
- Once you have entered the folder, press Ctrl + E to open a new Search tools.

- You will see multiple search options, including Unread, click on it to filter all other emails. Another thing you can do is use the Scope feature to further refine your search if necessary.
- Your email list will now contain only unread emails, so you can select them all without worrying about affecting other email categories. To do this, highlight the first email in the list, then press Control + Change + End to flag all emails.
- Press Delete to delete all selected emails.
Using the filter feature to delete unread emails
Another way to access all your unread emails is by using the Filter feature. It works similar to the search function. Here’s how to filter and delete all your unread emails:
- From the Mail see, go to the folder that contains the offending emails, in this case, the unread emails.
- Gonna Home > Filter Email > Unreadall other emails will be filtered and here you can also use the Scope feature.

- Once you have your list of unread emails, select the first one and press Control + Change + End to select all others, then press the button Delete key. All emails that are included in the scope of the filtering will be deleted..
Using the Search Folder Feature to Delete Unread Emails
He search folder This feature is a very convenient way to gather all unread emails in multiple folders in one place, where you can then delete them. Here’s how to use it:
- From the main screen, go to File Click on the New search folder button in the upper left corner of the window.

- A new dialog box will open with multiple search folder options to choose from. Click unread email to create a folder that will collect all your unread emails.

- The left navigation panel now has a new Search folders category, under which you can see the unread email folder you just created.
- Open the folder and use one of the following two ways to select all your emails:
- Highlight any email in the list, then press Ctrl + A to select them all.
- Highlight the first email and then use the Control + Change + End combination.
- Press Delete to delete all unread emails.
This might be the most convenient option yet, as you don’t need to enter each folder separately as the first two methods require. Instead, Search Folder will collect all your unread emails and you can delete them in a matter of seconds.
The last word
As you can see, Outlook comes with multiple native bulk delete options. There are also about 3third third-party solutions, but they don’t really help when it comes to deleting emails in bulk. That said, they offer a variety of other options for managing emails, so if you need such a solution, you can find the highest-rated ones online.
When it comes to getting rid of your unread emails, the features that Outlook offers are more than enough. Don’t you think?