This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Messages not deleting from Outlook server

more options

My fiance uses Hotmail, has for years. She didn't clean up her mailbox and has over 150,000 messages. Manually cleaning them up in the Outlook web interface is not practical. I've downloaded and installed Thunderbird, set up Outlook for POP access (and enabled the setting "Let apps and devices delete messages from Outlook") and set up Thunderbird to log into Outlook. All that works, but the old messages are still there, back to 2010. I started with it only keeping 30 days, no luck. Went to 90, nothing. Then 365, still no messages were removed. I tried 2190 days, still no messages were removed. Is there some way to force Thunderbird to just purge the messages of a certain age? Is there another way to get all those old messages deleted?

My fiance uses Hotmail, has for years. She didn't clean up her mailbox and has over 150,000 messages. Manually cleaning them up in the Outlook web interface is not practical. I've downloaded and installed Thunderbird, set up Outlook for POP access (and enabled the setting "Let apps and devices delete messages from Outlook") and set up Thunderbird to log into Outlook. All that works, but the old messages are still there, back to 2010. I started with it only keeping 30 days, no luck. Went to 90, nothing. Then 365, still no messages were removed. I tried 2190 days, still no messages were removed. Is there some way to force Thunderbird to just purge the messages of a certain age? Is there another way to get all those old messages deleted?

Modified by lagunamiata

All Replies (2)

more options

I was going to try and remove the question, but can't find out how... I turned off all the POP settings in Outlook, turned them back on and it's deleting now. Guess the settings didn't take the first time.

more options

Well I spoke too soon... still have messages on the Outlook server.