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How can I delete older emails before a specified date?

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  • 1 has this problem
  • 136 views
  • Last reply by christ1

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I keep getting a warning saying my email account is nearly full. To prevent random loss of emails I need to delete older stored emails before a certain date - how do I filter these out to delete?

I keep getting a warning saying my email account is nearly full. To prevent random loss of emails I need to delete older stored emails before a certain date - how do I filter these out to delete?

Chosen solution

Select the first message you want to delete. Then press and hold Shift and select the last message to be deleted. This selects all messages in between the first and the last one. By holding down Ctrl and click on a message you can select or de-select it individually. Then press Del to delete all selected messages.

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Sort by date, then highlight all the messages you want to delete, press Del. You may want to create a backup of your Thunderbird profile before that. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_Backing_Up_and_Restoring

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Probably being stupid but how do you sort by date to only show emails before a certain date?

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Sorting by date will not only show emails before a certain date. But it will help you to determine from which date on you want to delete messages.

In order to delete messages from a certain date there is no need to only show the messages to be deleted.

You just need to highlight the ones you want to delete.

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and how do you highlight a large block of emails ?

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Chosen Solution

Select the first message you want to delete. Then press and hold Shift and select the last message to be deleted. This selects all messages in between the first and the last one. By holding down Ctrl and click on a message you can select or de-select it individually. Then press Del to delete all selected messages.