Selectively deleting messages - possible?

[Peter Rooney]

I have accumulated thousands of incoming e-mails in my Inbox folder. Most of
these come from maillists or from spam. Now I would like to delete some.
I want to delete all messages that I have NOT read,
and keep all messages that I HAVE read.
The reason is that if I have read them, they were interesting to me at the
time they came in, and I may want to consult them again. If I didn't read
them at the time, I don't ever want to read them.
I know it IS possible to delete a group of messages by sorting on the
appropriate column display. For example, I can sort on the "Received" column
and delete all messages prior to a given date. If there were a column called
"Read", then I could divide the messages between "Read" and "Not Read", and
delete the "Not Read" ones.

P.S. It would also be satisfactory to send the "Read" messages into a
separate folder.

[PA Bear]

[This is an OE5.0-specific newsgroup; you're running OE6 in WinXP SP2.]

1. Inbox folder is NOT a suitable location for archiving. If possible, Move
the bulk of these messages to another Local folder you've created for this
purpose.

2. Ditto for Sent Items folder.

3. You cannot Search a folder for Read vs Unread messages though you can use
Search (Find) to "filter" against the TO, FROM, SUBJECT, message content
fields as well as dates received.

Once you've determined what you want to delete, you can (a) keep the CTRL
key depressed while selecting the message and then delete them all or (b)
keep the SHIFT key depressed, select the first message in the list then the
last message, and then delete them all.

4. Now delete the contents of your Delete Items folder.

5. Now compact all folders
(http://www.insideoe.com/files/maintain.htm#compact).

General OE Caveats:

- Don't use Inbox or Sent Items to archive messages. Move them to local
folders created for this purpose.

- Empty Deleted Items folder daily.

- Disable Background Compacting [not available in SP2] and frequently
perform a manual compact of all OE folders while "working offline". More at
http://www.insideoe.com/files/maintain.htm

- WinXP SP2 only: Do not shut down your machine while Windows is
automatically compacting your message store.

- Your anti-virus application's email scanning feature can also cause such
corruption. Disable it. It provides no additional protection.
--
OE-specific newsgroup (any version):
news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.outlookexpress.general

~Robear Dyer (PA Bear)
MS MVP-Windows (IE, OE, Security, Shell/User)

Post by Peter Rooney
I have accumulated thousands of incoming e-mails in my Inbox folder. Most of
these come from maillists or from spam. Now I would like to delete some.
I want to delete all messages that I have NOT read,
and keep all messages that I HAVE read.
The reason is that if I have read them, they were interesting to me at the
time they came in, and I may want to consult them again. If I didn't read
them at the time, I don't ever want to read them.
I know it IS possible to delete a group of messages by sorting on the
appropriate column display. For example, I can sort on the "Received" column
and delete all messages prior to a given date. If there were a column called
"Read", then I could divide the messages between "Read" and "Not Read", and
delete the "Not Read" ones.
P.S. It would also be satisfactory to send the "Read" messages into a
separate folder.

[Steve Cochran]

Go to View | Current View | Hide read messages. Then do a CTRL-A to select
all the messages and then right click on the selection and choose Move to
folder. Then you can go to View | Current View | Show all messages to see
the unread ones again. That will then segregate them.

steve

Post by Peter Rooney
I have accumulated thousands of incoming e-mails in my Inbox folder. Most
of these come from maillists or from spam. Now I would like to delete some.
I want to delete all messages that I have NOT read,
and keep all messages that I HAVE read.
The reason is that if I have read them, they were interesting to me at the
time they came in, and I may want to consult them again. If I didn't read
them at the time, I don't ever want to read them.
I know it IS possible to delete a group of messages by sorting on the
appropriate column display. For example, I can sort on the "Received"
column and delete all messages prior to a given date. If there were a
column called "Read", then I could divide the messages between "Read" and
"Not Read", and delete the "Not Read" ones.
P.S. It would also be satisfactory to send the "Read" messages into a
separate folder.