One good way to make sure that you are caught up on all of your email correspondence is by looking at the number of unread messages in a folder. If a message is marked as unread, then it probably means that you haven’t taken action on that message. But if you have just configured a new account, transferred messages from one folder to another, or changed a rule, then you might have a lot of messages that are marked as unread, but should not be that way. Fortunately you can easily mark an entire folder as read in Outlook 2013, meaning that you won’t need to individually click on each message.
Quickly Mark An Entire Folder as Read in Outlook 2013
Note that this does not delete any of these messages, it just removed the “unread” status from them. The messages are still in that folder, and will still show up in searches. They are just no longer bolder, and Outlook will treat them as being read. Additionally, this action can take some time if you have a high number of unread messages.
Step 1: Launch Outlook 2013.
Step 2: Locate the folder containing the messages that you want to mark as read.
Step 3: Right-click the folder, then select the Mark All as Read option.
Wait a few seconds (possibly longer if there a lot of unread messages) then the number in blue will disappear from next to the folder name, and there will no longer be any bolded messages in the folder. Note that new messages that come into the folder will still be marked as unread.
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You can change the send/receive frequency in Outlook 2013 if you would like Outlook to check for new messages more frequently.
See also
- How to disable work offline in Outlook
- How to strikethrough in Outlook
- How to create a Vcard in Outlook
- How to view the blocked sender list in Outlook
- How to set up Gmail in Outlook
Matthew Burleigh has been writing tech tutorials since 2008. His writing has appeared on dozens of different websites and been read over 50 million times.
After receiving his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science he spent several years working in IT management for small businesses. However, he now works full time writing content online and creating websites.
His main writing topics include iPhones, Microsoft Office, Google Apps, Android, and Photoshop, but he has also written about many other tech topics as well.
