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Messages not deleting from Outlook server

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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)

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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.

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