How to mark messages as expired in Outlook?

After a long time there may be so many email messages in the mailbox that makes your mailbox big and working heavily. Actually, if you have specified expired date for email messages, you can hide or remove those old expired email messages easily. In this article, I will introduce several methods to mark email messages as expired in Microsoft Outlook easily.

Mark received messages as expired in Outlook

Auto mark sent items as expired in Outlook 2010 and 2013

Auto mark sent items as expired in Outlook 2007

Mark received messages as expired in Outlook

If you want to mark received messages as expired in Microsoft Outlook, you can do as following:

Step 1: Double click the email that you want to mark as expired.

Step 2: Click the anchor at the bottom-right corner of Tags group (or Options tab in Outlook 2007) on the Message tab.

Note: You can also click File > Properties to display the Properties dialog box in Outlook 2010 and 2013.

Step 3: In the popping up Properties dialog box (or Message Options dialog box in Outlook 2007), check the option of Expires after, enter certain date and time in the following boxes, and click the Close button. See screen shot below:

Step 4: Save and close this opening email message.

Note: This method is also available to mark sent messages and composing messages as expired, too.

Auto mark sent items as expired in Outlook 2010 and 2013

This section will introduce a tricky to automatically add expired date for all sent email messages in Microsoft Outlook 2010 and 2013.

Step 1: Click the File > Options.

Step 2: In the Outlook Options dialog box,

(1) Click the Mail in the left bar;

(2) Go to the Send messages section, and check the option of Mark messages as expired after this many days, and specify a certain number in the following box. See screen shot:

Step 3: Click the OK button to close the Outlook Options dialog box.

From now on, all sent email messages will be added with an expired date when sending.

For example, you have preset the option of Mark messages as expired after 180 days in the Outlook Options, and now you are creating an email on 2014/8/10, it will set the expired date on 2015/2/6 automatically.

Auto mark sent items as expired in Outlook 2007

It’s quite different to configure Outlook 2007’s options to automatically mark sent email messages as expired. You can following these steps to set:

Step 1: Click the Tools > Options.

Step 2: Click the E-mail Options button on the Preferences tab in the coming Options dialog box.

Step 3: In the popping up E-mail Options dialog box, click the Advanced E-mail Options button.

Step 4: Now you get into the Advanced E-mail Options dialog box, check the option of Message expire after x days, and enter a certain number into the box. See screen shot below:

Step 5: Click OK buttons to close all dialog boxes.