It’s Time To Clean Out Your Inbox

If you’re like most people, then you receive upwards of 100 messages per day in your inbox. However, if you aren’t Outlook savvy, then you may think you have to manually go in and click each message you want to delete or move one at a time. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some Outlook tips that could help make cleaning out your inbox easier?

Luckily, you can easily clean Outlook inbox by selecting multiple messages or selecting all messages that meet specific criteria.

How To Select Multiple Emails In Outlook

Whether you are trying to learn how to select multiple emails in Outlook to delete or simply move messages to new folders so you can organize Outlook email, you’ll need to know how to select multiple emails on Outlook. Before you do anything, though, you’ll need to identify which version of Outlook you are using: the web app, mobile app, or desktop version.

Select multiple emails in Outlook web app

If you are using your mail account on web, follow these steps:

Navigate to https://outlook.live.com/.
From your inbox view, hover over a message you want to choose.
A check box will now appear on the left side of that message — click it.
Continue clicking check boxes for all messages you want to choose.

💡 Note: You can also use Clean Email to select multiple messages and apply a number of actions to them, not to mention perform other inbox management tasks. We’ll discuss this more at the end of the post.

How to mass select emails in Outlook mobile app

If you frequently check messages from your smartphone, follow these steps:

Open the Outlook mobile app.
From your inbox view, tap or long-press the circle icon on the left of any message.
Now, you will have the option to tap the circle icon to the left of any messages you want to choose. Go through your inbox and tap any number of emails.
Once messages are selected, you can choose what you’d like to do with them in the upper right corner. Options include delete, archive, move, report, ignore, mark as read/unread, flag, pin, snooze, or choose all.

How to select multiple emails in Outlook desktop app

If you use the desktop application, follow these steps:

Open the Outlook desktop app on your computer.
From the inbox (or folder in which you want to choose messages from), press and hold Ctrl (Command on Mac), and click on any emails you’d like to select.
If you want to select a set of messages in a row, you can also use Shift and click the first message, then scroll down and click the last message you want to be selected. Outlook will select all the emails between those two.

How To Select All Emails In Outlook

Highlighting multiple messages can be handy. However, if you’re trying to achieve Outlook Inbox Zero, there may be times when you want to know how to select all emails in Outlook, whether that’s all messages in a folder or every message in your inbox.

Just like we saw with selecting multiple emails, this process varies based on the type of Outlook app you’re using, so we will cover each one below.

💡 Note: If you also use Gmail, we have a post dedicated to how to select all in Gmail.

How to select all Outlook emails on web

To do this, simply:

Open https://outlook.live.com/.
From the inbox, click on the check box at the top of your listed messages (below Mark All As Read).
If you don’t see the check, you can also click on any message in your inbox, then press Ctrl + A (or Command + A on Mac). This will select all messages for you.

Select all emails in Outlook app on mobile

If you’re using the mobile app, follow these steps:

Open your mail account.
Long press to choose any message in your inbox.
Tap on More (three dots) in the upper right corner.
At the bottom of the menu, tap Select All.
This will select all messages in your inbox (or any folder you are in).

How to select all emails in Microsoft Outlook client

Within Microsoft Outlook client (desktop app), you have two options to select all messages.

With Method #1, you can:

Select a single message in your inbox (or any folder).
Press Ctrl + A (Command + A for Mac).
This will select all messages.

With Method #2, you can actually use the Quick Access Toolbar to highlight all messages. However, this setting isn’t available by default. We’ll outline the steps to add it to your Quick Access Toolbar, then use the tool.

Open the desktop application.
Click on the down arrow in the top left corner of the app. This is the menu to Customize Quick Access Toolbar.
Scroll down and click More Commands.
When the menu appears, change the Choose Commands From drop-down to say All Commands.
Now, in the box with the commands, scroll down to the one that says Select All. Click that.
Now, scroll over and click Add in the middle of the menu.
Click OK to commit this change.

Once you’ve added this, you can simply click on Select All from the menu.

How to select all unread emails in Outlook web app

To do this:

Open your mail account on web.
From the inbox, click on Filter directly above the emails.
Choose the option that says Unread.
Your focused inbox view will now only show unread messages. You can press the check at the top to select all or use Ctrl + A to do so.

How to select all emails from one sender in Outlook web app

Sometimes, you may want to select a group of messages from the same sender so you can move them to a dedicated folder or perform another task. Luckily, this isn’t hard either.

Open your mail account on web.
At the top, use the Search feature to search the sender you want to select messages from. Click on that person’s name as it appears.
Your view will now show all the results from that sender.
From here, you can press the check at the top to select all or use Ctrl + A to select all of these messages.

Clean Email Makes Selecting Multiple Emails Even Easier

Learning how to use Outlook can be tricky at times. However, you don’t have to perform every action in your mailbox if you don’t want to. In fact, you can use Clean Email to manage your inbox without ever opening Outlook at all.

It is easy to choose all emails in Outlook with Clean Email and apply actions like delete, move, star, archive, etc. You just need to choose a folder like All Mail, Inbox, or Unread from the left-side panel. Then, click the Select all button above the messages to select the whole group.

If you just want to select multiple emails, you can do that too. It works much the same way as it does in your Outlook inbox — you just mark the checkboxes next to the messages you want to choose. It’s easy to then perform any action you want.

However, that’s not all Clean Email has to offer. In fact, the app offers a number of additional features that you don’t have within your Outlook inbox, and you can take advantage of them all.

For example, Smart Folders lets you filter messages based on specific criteria. This makes it easier to locate and filter emails so you can go through and select the messages you want and move them to the appropriate folder.

Use Smart Folders to select similar emails

Then, Auto Clean can help you automate tasks so you don’t have to keep doing them over and over again. So, if you want to automatically have all emails from some senders go into the Archive folder, you can perform a task moving those messages one time within Clean Email, then simply choose “Selected and future similar emails.” This turns it into an automated rule that runs each time a new message that meets the criteria comes into your inbox.

Archive emails automatically with Clean Email

If you want to simply get rid of promotional mailings or unnecessary newsletters, the app makes that easy with the Unsubscriber feature. This tool lets you unsubscribe, pause, or move all messages from a specific domain into a Read Later folder.

Unsubscribe from emails with Clean Email

Of course, those are just some of the top features, but Clean Email can do much more than that. If you’re ready to reclaim your inbox, it’s worth giving this app a try.

💡 Note: If you use the Outlook web service provider (meaning you have an @outlook.com email address or similar), Clean Email can work with that. If you simply use the Outlook desktop client with your Gmail, Yahoo, or other accounts, the actions you perform within Clean Email may not appear in the Outlook desktop app.

Wondering to learn more tips and tricks? Check out guides on how to delete folders in Outlook and how the Outlook categories work.

How To Select Emails In Outlook - FAQs

How do you select multiple emails to delete in Outlook?

Within Outlook, you can delete multiple messages all at once after you select them. You just need to follow the steps to select messages based on the version of Outlook you use, then click Delete within the app.

How do I select thousands of emails in Outlook?

Outlook offers ways to Select All messages within a folder or based on the filtering criteria you specify. This means you can easily choose thousands of messages with just a few clicks if they all have a commonality like “marked as read” or they’re from the same sender.

Is there a Select All option in Outlook?

Trying to learn how to select all emails in Outlook is tricky. But, Outlook does offer the option to Select All messages. If you’re using the desktop app, though, you will need to add it to your Quick Access Toolbar first.

How do I select multiple emails in Outlook with keyboard?

You can use Ctrl to select multiple messages or Shift to choose messages next to each other. You can also use Ctrl + A to select all messages in a specific folder.