Keyboard Shortcut to Quickly Archive Batches of Emails in Outlook Webmail

Archive batches of emails in Outlook Webmail can be time consuming as there is a threshold to the number of emails you can archive at one time. Fortunately Microsoft gives us a keyboard shortcut so you can click and press your way to inbox zero!

Introducing my new favourite Keyboard Shortcut in Outlook Webmail:

If you hover your mouse over the Archive button in Outlook Webmail, you’ll see a popup that shows the letter “E”. Pressing the key on the keyboard while having a batch of emails selected will send them all to the Archive folder.

Now, with that said, there’s a weird glitch or feature (depending on how you look at it) in Outlook Webmail, where when you select the “select all” checkbox (#1 in screenshot above), it only selects the first nine (9) emails… don’t believe me? Give it a try and scroll down through the list of emails in that folder. As you can see, only the visible emails are selected.

Fortunately there is away around this – although it was rather hidden and I stumbled it on accident when clicking around. After using the Select All checkbox, you’ll see the Preview Pane will have a summary of the # of conversations you have selected. By clicking on the text that says “Select everything in your… XXX folder”, Outlook Webmail will indeed select everything – see:

Before:

After:

Now, the *weird* thing is that certain buttons disappear when you have everything selected. Notice how the Archive button is gone? See:

Fortunately this doesn’t happen every time you select all, just when you surpass a certain threshold. The Archive button is still visible for small batches of under 30 emails or “conversations”. I haven’t played around enough or taken the time to research the actual threshold, but I can say with certainty that it doesn’t work when you have selected hundreds of emails at once.

Now interestingly, you can batch delete everything in a folder even if the number of emails is in the hundreds. There’s a nice handy “Empty Folder” button that will take care of that job for you.
Done and dusted to the dustbin.