Stump the PC Club is a free tech-advice column written by members of the North Orange County Computer Club, which has been in existence since 1976. Visit the club’s site at noccc.org.
QUESTION: I just went to my Webmail at Cox and noticed that there are literally hundreds of old e-mail messages there. Is there any way to delete all of them at once rather than only 10 at a time? How do you prevent this from happening? By the way we’re still using Outlook Express.
PC CLUB: This situation haunts many of us from time to time. It can happen with Outlook Express, Outlook, Windows Live Mail and other programs. It can also happen with other providers in addition to Cox. It all stems from a setting in our E-mail program which can be easily changed. However, changing the setting will only prevent it from happening in the future but removing all of those existing E-mails is another story.
I’ll tell you how to change the settings and how to remove all of those pesky E-mails at one time. Most E‑mail programs have a setting with options similar to the following:
- Leave a copy of message on the server – this setting allows all of your E-mail messages to accumulate.
- Remove after x days where x can be any number of your choice – this setting removes messages after a number of days that you specify.
- Remove from server when deleted from “Deleted Items” – this choice tells the E-mail program to delete the message from the server when you delete from the “Deleted” folder in your E‑mail program.
In Outlook Express go to Tools, Accounts and select the Mail tab and highlight your account and select Properties. Click the Advanced tab and in the Delivery section make your choice. If Leave a copy of message on server is checked, you can uncheck it. For other E-mail programs you can search Google for how to change the settings. For example, you can search for “Outlook 2007 delete messages from server”.
There are occasions when it might make sense to leave messages on the server. For a discussion of this topic see a previous article at http://bit.ly/emailsettings.
In order to delete all of your messages at your E-mail server such as Cox or Time Warner you can use a very clever free program called Pop Peeper. It’s available at www.poppeeper.com. You can download this program and install it to any folder you want. This program not only can remove E-mail messages from your server but it can check your E-mail from almost any E-mail server including Cox, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail and many others. Once you install it, it sits in your System Notification area and lets you know when you have a new message.
When you’re ready to remove messages from your server, just select them in the main window of PopPeeper and click the Delete button on your keyboard. An X will show next to the message indicating that it will be deleted the next time that PopPeeper checks for new messages. The default is every 5 minutes but you can click the button on the lower left to force it to check now. This class of program is called an E-mail notifier and there is a variety to choose from. I’ve tried them all but this is the best. You can search Google for “email notifier” to see what’s available.
In summary, PopPeeper is a great program to delete messages from your server and also a way to check several E-mail accounts at the same time. I use it to check 6 E-mail accounts with the click of a button.
Be sure to go to my Web site and click the Contac Me menu to send me a question you’d like answered. You’ll also find the archives of my articles there as well - Ed Schwartz, NOCCC member. View my Web site at www.edwardns.com.