How to Auto-Delete Emails in Microsoft Outlook

After Gmail, Microsoft Outlook is the most popular email provider. Businesses love Microsoft Outlook because of its tight integration with the Office 365 package. As for consumers, Microsoft has done commendable work in terms of storage, cross-platform availability and features.

The Outlook application is available on iOS, Android, Windows, macOS and Web. The company purchased the popular Acompli app and the Sunrise calendar to accelerate the development of the mobile app. In short, there are sufficient reasons to use Outlook over its competitors for personal use. But with just 15 GB of free storage, you may run out of storage. And with the growing trend of marketing emails and unnecessary spam, it is more difficult than ever to filter out relevant emails from spam.

Microsoft offers the Targeted Inbox feature, but it is limited to filtering email that is relevant to the user. Another useful addition is Outlook Rules. This is the Outlook version of IFTTT. With the rules, you can create several automations to move certain e-mails to archive or delete the e-mail section.

In this article, we will walk you through the Outlook Rules feature, and we will create rules to delete and archive Outlook emails automatically. The post will also cover another Outlook bonus tip for unsubscribing from irrelevant emails from one place. Let’s start.

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Create an automatic deletion rule from email

First of all, the Rules function is only available on the Outlook Windows / Mac and Outlook Web application. In this article, I will mention the steps for the web version of Outlook.

Step 1: Open Outlook Web and sign in using Microsoft account credentials.

2nd step: Select an irrelevant email and open it.

Step 3: Press the three-dot menu and select Create rule.

Step 4: Create a rule to move messages from the sender to the deleted items.

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After that, all emails from the sender will be directly forwarded to the deleted inbox. You can still access it from the Deleted Items in Folders menu.

Create automatic deletion rules from Outlook settings

The above scenario moves all emails from the sender to the deleted items, but what if someone wants to delete emails with certain subject lines or keywords from the message body.

For example, I don’t want to receive loan offers, Corona virus updates, or any other unwanted advertising from my bank. However, I would like to receive the monthly statement and the credit card bill in my mail. So how do you put in place such rules? Follow the steps below.

Step 1: Open Outlook Web and go to settings.

2nd step: Display all Outlook settings and the dedicated settings menu will appear.

Step 3: Select the Rules option and select Add a new rule.

Step 4: Let’s call it Banking Rules and add a condition.

Step 5: Add keywords that no longer interest you, I added the terms of the message such as Ready, EMI, etc.

Step 6: Create a rule to move all emails to the deletion folder and tap Save.

Now, every time you receive emails with the keywords Ready, EMI, or Important, they are automatically moved to the deletion folder.

Let’s create another useful rule. Let’s go? Each company sends Coronavirus related emails to users. Although I applaud their efforts, it is sometimes tiring to read daily news about the deadly virus. Using Outlook rules, you can automatically delete these messages before they reach you.

Step 1: Open Outlook Web and go to Settings> Mail> Rules.

2nd step: Let’s give the name of the new rule “Coronavirus” and add conditions.

Step 3: Add conditions such as if the body of the message includes the keyword “Coronavirus”, “COVID-19”, and then move these emails to the deletion folder.

Outlook rules are a powerful feature and the possibilities are endless. Here’s how I use it. Whenever I’m on vacation, I create a rule to move all incoming email to a “While Traveling” folder and never be interrupted during family time.

Unsubscribe from irrelevant email senders

The automatic deletion feature is useful when you want to filter out relevant fake emails. But what if you want to completely stop receiving emails from the sender. Well, you can still use the email unsubscribe option.

But finding that little unsubscribe button in every mail can be long and boring. Fortunately, with Outlook Web, you can see all senders of emails with an unsubscribe button in one place.

Step 1: Open Outlook Web and go to settings.

2nd step: Navigate to Mail> Subscriptions.

Step 3: Here you will see the list of email senders with a large unsubscribe button.

Step 4: Unsubscribe unnecessary menu items, and you can also tap the three-dot menu to block the sender.

I use this feature once a quarter to remove irrelevant emails from the list.

Use Outlook like a pro

Microsoft Outlook contains an excellent rule function. You can use it to automatically delete, archive automatically, incoming emails, move them to different folders for a while, and even unsubscribe the unnecessary sender from the single menu. The above mentioned solution worked like a wonder for us. Have you found a different solution that doesn’t involve any third party apps?