I have two mailboxes at work and one is permanently diverted to the other – every now and again I have to go in and clear it out (as a copy of every inbound message is left in the first mailbox) and it looks like I should do it more often (I was within a few KB of having inbound mail bounced until I logged in this evening…).

I wondered what was filling my Inbox so I checked out the folder sizes and found that the biggest culprits were RSS feeds from Outlook 2007’s integration with the Internet Explorer (IE) 7 RSS reader (even though the computer still runs IE6 in order to access some legacy web applications – so there is no Outlook to IE integration, as described in Microsoft knowledge base article 920234 – the mailbox has been accessed previously on a machine with Outlook 2007 and IE7 installed and, as Tim Anderson noted a couple of years back, Outlook copies feed contents from the local machine to the mailbox and then keeps it synchronised).

As I read my feeds in Google Reader, I decided to remove them from Outlook – but how (other than individually)? Thanks to Jaap Steinvoorte’s post on deleting RSS feeds in Outlook 2007, I found the answer in the Outlook Account Settings, on the RSS Feeds tab, where there is a big remove button. The same approach can be applied to SharePoint Lists, Internet Calendars and Public Calendars.

Unfortunately, the cached content is still retained and RSS Feeds is a special folder it can’t be deleted… unless you use a downlevel client as Daniel Moth suggests – I used OWA on an Exchange Server 2003 server.

Sure, deleting the entire folder is overkill but it seems to be the only way other than inducing carpal tunnel syndrome through repetitive mouse/keyboard clicks and the end result is a considerably less full mailbox.