Sort Your Way to a Trimmer Inbox in Outlook

Oftentimes I have messages in my inbox with matching subjects. These are usually easy targets for mass deletion. As I'm looking at what to trash, most of the time when my messages are in groups I generally only care about the last message and members with attachments.


First add the "conversations" field to the current view. To do so right-click on current view bar and "Customize":

Add the "conversation" field to the view

Then do the following to get sorted:

• click "Conversation" tab to sort and group based on subjects
• hold down <Shift> key throughout the rest of this process
• click "Received" tab to sort based on this additional vector
• click "Received" tab again to reverse the date sort, so newest messages are on top

Outlook Inbox messages sorted by conversation, received

Hopefully this sort tip will get your Outlook Inbox closer to "zero" in short order!