Abstract

Do you get a lot of email notifications? I’m particularity thinking of daily notifications from your system which you largely ignore but still fill up your mailbox. This post is a short tutorial on how you can use the AutoArchive feature in Outlook to automatically delete these emails yet keep some recent emails for review.

Disclaimer

This post is solely informative. Critically think before using any information presented. Learn from it but ultimately make your own decisions at your own risk.

Requirements

I did all of the work for this post using the following major technologies. You may be able to do the same thing with different technologies or versions, but no guarantees.

Outlook from Microsoft 365

Introduction

My inbox fills up with “monitoring” emails which are sent by multiple servers every day. Do I review all these emails every day? Nope. Most times I don’t look at them for weeks, the emails build up into the hundreds, and when I do finally review them, I’m only interested in the latest ones. To help manage this, I configured the Outlook AutoArchive feature to automatically delete old emails I’m no longer interested in. Doing this is very easy.

Folder properties

First, right click on the folder (I’m sure you have already created a rule that moves the emails to a certain folder which you’ve been ignoring) and select properties as shown in figure 1.

Figure 1 - Folder Properties

AutoArchive Configuration

Next, select the AutoArchive tab and configure it the way you want. As you can see in figure 2, I have my folder configured to permanently delete emails which are older than 1 week.

Figure 2 - AutoArchive Configuration

Summary

That’s it. Very simple. Enjoy!