How to Mark All Emails as Read in Outlook on iPhone

Mark All Emails as Read in Outlook on iPhone Using Native Features

In the Outlook app for iPhone, you can select every message in a folder at once and mark them all as read:

Open the Outlook app and go to your Inbox or the folder you want to clear.
(Optional) Tap the Filters icon at the top right and choose Unread to show only unread messages.
Tap and hold any message to start selecting.
Tap the three-dot icon and choose Select All.
Tap the three-dot icon again and choose Mark Read.

The selected messages are now marked as read. In a large folder, check again with the Unread filter: Outlook works with the messages synced to your iPhone, so older ones may not have been included. The native approach to marking messages as read works fine if you want to mark a handful of emails once or twice, but using it to keep a busy inbox organized long-term can be a huge time sink for the following two reasons:

You can select messages one by one or the whole folder at once, but you can’t select all messages from several specific senders (say, Microsoft, Google, and your bank) in one step.
You can’t create inbox filters (also referred to as rules) based on the selected messages to automatically mark future similar messages as read when they arrive.

To overcome these and other limitations of the Outlook app for iPhone, we recommend you use a third-party inbox organizer called Clean Email.

Automatically Mark All Unread Emails as Read on Iphone Using Clean Email

It can take a lot of time to manually select a large number of unread emails in the Outlook app so that you can mark them as read using the native option. If you would rather use your time more productively, then Clean Email has just the right solution for you: its pre-defined unread mail filter. Here’s how you can use it:

Launch Clean Email and sign in to your Outlook inbox.
Scroll down until you see the Unread Mail option in the Favorite Mail Filters section. Tap it.

Tap the Unread Mail option in the Favorite Mail Filters section

Tap Select and Select All.

Tap Mark Read.

Okay, that was easy! But what if you want to mark only some messages? Perhaps those that were sent to you by specific senders? Well, that’s a matter of a few simple steps if you take advantage of Clean Email’s message grouping capabilities:

Launch Clean Email and sign in to your Outlook inbox.
Open the hamburger menu on the left and select the Inbox folder.

(Optional) Use the Group By dropdown menu to change how messages are grouped.
Tap the icon next to each message group you want to select, then choose Mark Read option to mark the selected groups as read.

Choose Mark Read option to mark the selected groups as read

If you want to automate this process then instead of the Mark Read option, tap the More button and then select the Create Rule option to create Auto Clean trigger conditions based on the selected message groups. You can then apply the Mark Read action to automatically mark all future (and optionally also existing) messages as read when the trigger conditions are met.

💡 Tip: But what if you only want to label as read older messages and keep the newest ones unread? Clean Email can do that too! Instead of tapping the Create Rule button, select the Keep Newest option instead to automatically open all messages except for those that each sender has sent to you the most recently.

By marking as read unread messages with Clean Email and relying on its other inbox cleaning features to stay organized, you can turn your Outlook email account into a more useful communication tool.

Summary

To clear unread emails once in a while, Outlook’s own Select All and Mark Read options are all you need. We recommend you take the time to automate the management of your Outlook inbox using Clean Email because you will save a lot of time in the long run. But if you just want to see the unread notification counter display zero, then the manual approach is a good way to get started.

FAQ

Why do some emails stay unread after I tap Mark Read in Outlook on iPhone?

Outlook for iPhone works with the messages synced to your device, so in a large folder, older messages may not be loaded when you tap Select All. When you apply the Unread filter and more matching messages may exist, Outlook offers to search for all filtered items. Use that option to find the remaining unread messages and mark them as read too.