How to Delete All Emails in a Folder in Outlook 2013

Do you have a lot of emails in a folder in your Outlook account, and you want to delete all of them? While you might have found a way to do this by manually selecting the emails, there’s actually an option on a shortcut menu that lets you delete all of the items in an Outlook folder.

Learn how to turn multiple Outlook contacts into one consolidated list.

Our tutorial below will walk you through the process of emptying all of the emails out of a folder in Outlook 2013. The deleted emails will then be moved to your Deleted Items folder where you will be able to delete them permanently, if you so choose.

How to Empty a Folder in Outlook 2013

The steps in this article were performed in Microsoft Outlook 2013. By completing these steps you will be deleting all of the emails in a particular folder and moving them to the Trash folder.

You can then perform the same action to empty the Trash folder. Note that this can take a while if you are deleting a high number of emails.

Additionally, if you are using IMAP for your email account, these emails will also be deleted from your email server when you perform this action.

Step 1: Open Outlook 2013.

Step 2: Locate the folder containing the emails that you want to delete. I am deleting all of the emails in the WordPress folder in the picture below.

delete all emails from an outlook folder

Step 3: Right-click the target folder, then click the Delete All option.

how to empty a folder in outlook 2013

Step 4: Click the Yes button in the pop-up window to confirm that you want to move all of these emails to the Deleted Items folder.

how to delete all emails from a folder in outlook 2013

As mentioned earlier, this can take a while if you have a lot of emails. It can also take a while for the item count to be updated with your email host if you are doing this on an IMAP email account.

Would you like Outlook to automatically empty your Deleted Items folder when you close the application? Find out how you can do this if you would prefer that your deleted items are permanently removed from your account whenever you close Outlook.

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