Last Updated on October 11, 2026
Most people these days have one or more email accounts and access them either through an email client such as Microsoft Outlook or the newer Outlook for Windows app. You may also be using a webmail service such as Gmail or Yahoo. For those who are using a Microsoft email address such as an outlook.com address, there is a good chance you are viewing your email via the Outlook website.
If you have been using email for even a short amount of time, you probably noticed how quickly your inbox and other email folders will fill up with messages from friends, family, coworkers and even people you don’t want to receive email from! Plus, you will also notice a buildup of messages in your default Sent and Deleted folders which don’t seem to get emptied or cleaned out by many people.
For those of you who are using the Outlook webmail service from your web browser, we will be showing you exactly how to delete all emails over a certain age. You can easily cleanup your email folders and get some of your storage space back. This keeps your account running smoothly.
Deleting Old Outlook Webmail Messages
1. Identify Your Oldest Emails
For our example, we will do some cleanup on the Sent Items folder to remove any emails over 6 months old. The image below shows that the oldest email in the Sent Items folder dates back to 7/28/22. We will only have messages that are from January 2022 and newer after we finish this process.
2. Check Your Email Storage Usage
To view your email storage usage, you can click on the settings gear icon at the upper right corner of the Outlook webmail website. Here you will see the overall storage used by your Microsoft account. You must then scroll down directly to the Email storage section.
3. Review Folder Storage Space
You will then be able to see all of the folders you have configured within your Outlook email account. This includes any custom folders that you have created manually. It will also show you how much storage space each of these folders is using as well as how many actual emails are inside each folder.
4. Select the Deletion Timeframe
To delete the messages from a specific folder such as Sent Items, you can click on the down arrow icon next to the trash can icon that says Empty next to it. You can then choose to empty all of the messages if you want to remove absolutely everything. You will also see that you can remove emails 3, 6 or 12 months and older. We will now choose the 6 months and older option since that is our primary goal.
5. Confirm the Permanent Deletion
You will then be prompted to confirm the deleting of the messages. You are also told that they will be permanently deleted so you will not be able to restore them later. The system deletes them completely from the server database.
6. Verify the Final Results
Now that the emails have been deleted, we can go back to the Sent Items folder and see that the oldest message is 12/6/2023. This is actually more like 7 months older rather than 6. The reason for this is that there were no email messages from January, so it shows the next oldest month available.
Here is how you can delete Gmail messages older than a certain date.
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