Deleting your Sent Items folder in Microsoft Outlook normally means deleting all emails or moving them to an archive. Whatever you prefer, here’s how to automate the process by not saving sent emails or saving them in a different folder.
When you send an email, Outlook sends the original email to the recipient and saves a copy of that email in the Sent Items folder. This default behavior makes perfect sense and will probably never change, but that doesn̵
Outlook allows you to turn this off so that it doesn’t save a copy of your sent emails in the Sent Items folder. If you normally delete everything in your shipped items, this is all you need.
To automatically move items to a folder other than Sent Items, stop Outlook from saving a copy in your Sent Items and create a rule that sends a copy of all emails you send to the folder of your choice .
We are interested in doing this by default for all emails, but you can do this once for an individual email. In your Outlook application, open the “Options” tab and click “Save sent item to”, which gives you the option of specifying a particular folder or not saving the sent email at all.
But we can’t think of many situations where you would want to do this. And if you did, it would be easier to just delete or move the email from Sent Items. However, if you want to do this automatically for all emails, here’s how.
Stop saving sent e-mails
To prevent Microsoft Outlook from saving a copy of your sent emails, open File> Options.
In the Mail tab, scroll down to the “Save messages” section and uncheck “Save copies of messages in the Sent Items folder.
Now click on “OK” at the bottom right of the “Options” window.
If you just want Outlook to stop saving sent emails, this is all you need to do.
If you want the email client to store your sent emails in a different folder, you need to create a rule to make it do so.
Save sent e-mails in another folder
In Microsoft Outlook, click Home> Rules> Manage Rules and Alerts.
Now select the “New rule” button.
In the Rules Wizard window that opens, click “Apply rule to messages I send” and then select the “Next” button.
The next panel is “What condition (s) do you want to check?” As we want this rule to apply to all emails sent, don’t check any conditions, just click ‘Next’. A dialog box will appear asking you to confirm that this rule will affect all emails you send. Click on “Yes”.
Choose the option “move a copy to the specified folder” and select the underlined text to choose the folder.
In the folder list that appears, select the folder in which you want to save your sent e-mails and then click “OK”.
Now select the “Next” button.
Click “Next” again, name your rule on the last screen, then select “Finish”.
From now on, all emails you send will be saved in the folder you chose instead of Sent Items.
This rule only works if you are sending emails through the Microsoft Outlook desktop client. When you send emails through the Outlook web app, they are saved in the Sent Items folder. There is no equivalent way to create a sent email rule in the Outlook web app.
