Some urgent help needed please.

[Lesley Cox]

Today something went horribly wrong - don't know how - with my computer and the entire contents of my deleted file and my recycle bin fed into my Inbox!. Total of 125,000 plus emails, all in my Inbox. I phoned Telecom and a very charming young man in India told me what to do about it, over an hour and a half. He himself deleted all the contents of the bin and the deleted files but even so I am left with over 5000 emails still in my Inbox. He said I will have to highlight what I want saved including the 50 odd that came in today and put them in a new folder. I've done that. Now I need to delete totally, what's left in the old Inbox but he only got as far as telling me to right click on the Inbox. I've done that and want to delete but the Delete isn't selected (highlighted) so I can't delete. I want to delete before tomorrow's start to come in or else I will have to go right through the whole 5000 plus again to find the new ones and those I want to keep.

Can someone tell me what to do to select the delete option, having right clicked the Inbox. Please?? My Indian man is going to phone at 11am tomorrow to see how I got on but I need to delete the original Inbox before more emails start to come into it.

[David Nicholson]

Lesley, I don't think there is a way to delete from the Inbox "en masse". You will need to click on each individual email and once it is highlighted delete it with the red cross delete button at the top of your screen, before moving on to the next etc.

[mark smyth]

I think you might have accidentally click on restore the contents of the recycle. I delete everything in my deleted box once a week

You should use disc clean up once a month
start
programmes
accessories
system tools
disc clean up
OK

[Tony Willis]

Lesley

right click on the inbox and the option will be there to create a new folder. Name it and drag and drop your new emails into it and they will be safe.

Now for a tedious bit but it can be done in batches.

Highlight the first email you want to delete and then hold down control which should be bottom left on the key board. Holding it down click on each email and they should turn blue until you have say 25 highlighted. Press the delete key and they will go into deleted items. Just keep doing this until they are all done.

You can then drag the items you moved back  into the inbox.

You will then need to clear out deleted items but this can be done later

There are other ways but if you are not conversant with messing behind the scenes they are best left alone

Sorry I see you have saved the ones to a new folder already

[mark smyth]

Lesley you need to tell us what you are using for emailing. I use outlook

[mark smyth]

With outlook I click from and delete en masse by holding down the delete button

[Darren]

It is possible to delete en-masse from a search results window. e.g. if you had a load of e-mail from a particular source which you know you no longer want you could do a search for mails from that person then you should be able to delete them from within the search results en-masse by selecting them all and right-click delete. It works in my version of outlook here in the office. Might help you thin it out a bit!

[Maren]

Leslie,

it's simpler than that:

1) Open your In folder whose entire contents you wish to delete (I hope that's right)
2) highlight the first email i.e. single click on it with your left mouse button
3) Press Ctrl + A (the Control button and the letter 'a' at the same time). This will highlight your entire folder contents
4) Press shift + delete (the shift key and the delete button at the same time). Message: are you sure you want to permanently delete the selected items?
5) Select: yes. But there is no coming back from this.

Good luck.

[Diane Clement]

5) Select: yes. But there is no coming back from this.  

oh yes, there is, they just go into your deleted items folder 
edit by Diane - they don't if you hold down shift while pressing delete

[Tony Willis]

5) Select: yes. But there is no coming back from this. 

oh yes, there is, they just go into your deleted items folder 

Maren

well done I did not know about 'Control a' but it is now logged in the brain.useful to know

My question to Lesley would be why she does not empty her deleted items folder and recycle bin each week?

[David Pilling]

Perhaps the original situation was caused by an inadvertent drag and drop. I'm a little surprised you can delete 125,000 objects and not be bothered. An immediate use of "undo" - if available, would have been good.

Often you can order the contents of an inbox by clicking on the column headings e.g. "sent", "received", so you could have sorted old emails from new. This can be a handy way of finding emails from someone, if you order them by name.

Usually on Windows, delete sends things to the recycle bin, and shift+delete prompts for permission before deleting things for ever.

Windows is not an act of God, it's been designed and billions of dollars have been paid for it.

[Maren]

Actually Diane, they don't go into the Deleted Items folder if you keep the Shift key down (as indicated in Step 4) while selecting Delete.

If you use Microsoft Outlook, you can select to have your Delete folder emptied every time you close Outlook. It will ask you if you really want to do that. I find that rather handy because some emails go straight into the Delete folder if they are rejected by the rules I have set up.

To set up this option to auto delete, do this:

1) In Microsoft Outlook, select Tools, Options
2) Go to the final Tab called Other
3) In General, select: Empty the Deleted Items folder upon exiting.

[Diane Clement]

Actually Diane, they don't go into the Deleted Items folder if you keep the Shift key down (as indicated in Step 4) while selecting Delete.  

Oops, sorry, Maren, of course you're right, I didn't read your post thoroughly enough

[art600]

Thanks Maren for a useful tip - actioned already.

[Lesley Cox]

First of all. thanks very much to everyone who is doing their best to help me.
Mark I use Outlook Express 6

I haven't emptied my Deletions box because every few days my employer will tell me to find an email that someone sent back in 2008 or thereabouts. I have put thousands of deleted items to the recycle bin but when I next look, they're back in deleted. I didn't realize you could empty the recycle bin, thought everything remained there until the computer died, or I did.  So there's obviously a problem I'm not qualified to cope with.

The guy in India removed everything FROM the deleted and recycle bins which turned up in my Inbox but they were still going in as he was doing it (he did it in batches of 25,000 as he said my system was very slow. So much for local Broadband!)

Tony, your suggestion looks closest to what I need to do and I'll try that as soon as I've pit this morning's mew emails into the new email folder I created last night. I can try a few others as well and if the worst comes to the worst I'll wait until the man in India phones me at 11am.

I'm sorry to have been such a pain. It must be incredible to you all that I can have so little nouse about a machine I've been using for about 10 years (this and a couple of previous ones). Thanks for being so patient.

Lesley