Stop Wasting Your Time And Automate Email Management

Whether you're a casual Outlook user or it's your professional lifeline, keeping your inbox neat and organized is a must to avoid missing key emails and opportunities they bring. However, manual inbox management can be time-consuming and inefficient. As email has come a long way since its inception, so have the tools for organizing it.

If you find yourself sifting through every single message to determine its importance or whether it should be trashed, you're burning time that could be better used. Thankfully, it's a breeze to learn how to automate email deletion, and we're going to walk you through the whole process in this article. Check our short video about how to automate email tasks in Outlook and keep on reading.

Outlook’s Auto Delete Emails Feature

Outlook is capable of automatically deleting emails that you don’t consider to be important or legitimate, but it requires initial setup. You can achieve this by accessing either the web version of Outlook or the Windows/Mac application.

💡 Note: If you're aiming for enhanced control over your inbox, discover how Clean Email can assist in creating customized email rules.

On the Web

Outlook.com provides its users with the option to create both Outlook Sweep rules and standard rules within the platform, enabling a more tailored approach to email management.

How to auto delete emails in Outlook using the standard rules:

Log in with your email address and right-click on any message that you find irrelevant or malicious.
Now select Advanced actions, then click Create Rule.

Specify what you want to do with messages from this sender. If you want to delete them automatically, then tell Outlook to always move them to the Deleted Items folder.
Press OK to confirm.

How to create Sweep rules:

Log in with your email address and select the message or messages you want to be deleted automatically.
Click the Sweep button on the top menu bar.

Choose a pre-set action, indicate the destination to move the sender's messages (e.g., Deleted Items folder), and click OK to confirm.

Specify where you want to move the sender’s messages

Windows/Mac Desktop

Configuring Outlook to auto-delete emails is just as easy when accessing your email account through the Windows or Mac desktop email client. Simply follow these steps:

Launch Outlook for Windows or Mac.
Right-click on any message that you’d like to be deleted automatically.
Select Rules and choose the Create Rule option.

Configure the conditions for the rule and specify that you want to move all emails that match the conditions to the Deleted Items folder.
Click OK or Save to create the rule.

With a bit of effort, it shouldn’t be a problem to figure out how to automatically sort emails in Outlook using rules or how to move Outlook incoming emails into specific folders automatically.

On Mobile

Unfortunately, creating email rules is not currently available in the Outlook mobile app. However, you can use a third-party app like Clean Email, which provides advanced features to auto-delete emails and organize your inbox using rules on desktop and mobile devices. In the next section, we will discuss how to use the Auto Clean feature to simplify your email management process.

A Rule to Delete Emails Older Than 30 Days in a Folder Using Clean Email

Clean Email provides a more advanced and efficient solution for managing and organizing your inbox than the Outlook auto delete emails feature. Plus, the app offers a consistent experience across different devices and platforms, making it a superior choice for email management.

Clean Email’s Smart Folders automatically sort your messages by assigning them 30+ automatic labels that organize your inbox into convenient folders. What’s more, you can create a rule to manage emails from a chosen folder automatically, without any additional action needed from your side later on.

Let’s see how you can easily create a rule to automatically delete emails older than 30 days in a folder using Clean Email:

Download and app for Android or iOS, or go to app.clean.email and sign in with your Outlook account.
Choose a Smart Folder from the left-hand menu.
Select the sender(s) whose emails you would like to automatically delete after a certain period of time.
Tap More… → Create Rule.
Tap Edit to open all rule settings.
Name your rule, then choose the Old Mail option and press the filter again to specify the time period (for example, 30 days = 1 month ).
Additionally, you can choose to delete only the emails that are still unread or exceed a certain size in MBs.
Under Apply Action, choose Delete for permanent deletion.
Toggle the switch to apply the rule to existing messages.
Save the settings by clicking Create Rule.

⚠️ Warning: Be cautious, as this will delete your messages forever, freeing up space in your inbox without needing to clean up the Trash folder. However, if you prefer reviewing your deleted emails before completely removing them, choose the Trash action, and your emails will be moved to the Trash folder.

Archive Important Emails Automatically in Outlook

When it comes to important emails that you’d like to keep for future reference—such as emails from your boss or correspondence regarding a recent project—it’s a good idea to archive them. This way, they won’t clutter your inbox or distract you from current tasks, and you can avoid accidentally deleting them.

Archiving is your safe way to preserve these emails, and here’s how you can automate the Outlook archiving process for emails from your favorite senders using Clean Email:

Select Auto Clean from the left-hand menu.
Tap Create Rule or the plus (+) sign at the top.
Name your rule.
Tap the filter funnel icon next to Large Mail.
Choose Starred from the Star menu (for important messages). Then, select People from the Sent by menu, Important from the Labeled as menu, and Read from the Status menu.
Under Apply Action, choose Archive.
Turn on the Apply to existing messages switch.
Click Create Rule to finalize.

How to Automatically Delete Old Emails in Outlook

The desktop version of Microsoft Outlook has a useful feature that makes it possible to automatically delete emails that are older than a certain number of days, weeks, or months. The feature is called AutoArchive, and here’s how you can use it:

Launch Outlook for Windows or Mac.
Right-click your Inbox folder or any other folder of your choice. Select Properties and switch to the AutoArchive tab.
Click the Archive this folder using these settings options.
Choose how old you want the emails to be before automatically deleting them.
Select the Permanently delete old items option to delete emails without moving them to a different location first. Click OK to confirm.

Unfortunately, the AutoArchive feature can only be applied to entire folders—not specific senders and email messages in general. If that’s what you want to do, then the Clean Email app is your best option:

Go to: https://app.clean.email/ and sign in with your email account.
Select Inbox from the left pane and click Old Mail filter above the search box. Then specify the age of the emails you want to automatically delete (e.g., 6 months).

Select an email from any sender whose messages you would like to delete automatically. All messages from this sender or senders will be automatically selected.
Locate the Create Rule button on the action bar and click it.

Older than 6 months feature in Clean Email

If necessary, specify additional rule criteria, and under the Apply Action section, choose the Trash option.
Press Create Rule button and you're done!