Ok... I hate to admit this, but I have been using Outlook forever and a day, and until today I did not know this trick.

If you are like me, you get a ton of email sent to you. Inside Microsoft, there are all kinds of internal distribution lists ranging from .NET internals to blogging. I don't subscribe to a lot of them, but the ones I do are fairly high traffic. Add to that that 100 or so emails that end up directly in my Inbox, along with my aversion to deleting things in a timely manner, and I often find myself bumping up against the storage limit for our Exchange mailboxes. It is a once a month event that I get the "You are a Bad Boy" email from the Exchange system telling me I need to clean up my mailbox.

Now, I really don't want to clean up my inbox, there could be important stuff in there. And my Deleted Items folder may also contain some item I will need to go back and look at when someone says "Did you read the email from so and so?" (Which I deleted before even reading because I didn't think the email applied to me). So what I really want to do is go into the folders the store the email from the distribution lists and delete the thousands of emails that have accumlated over time. Easy enough, except that simply deleting them just moves them to my already "overly full" Deleted Items folder.

For quite sometime I have wondered how to just permanently delete a mail message in Outlook without it going to your Deleted Items folder. I searched help, I looked online - nothing. Today, however, I went to send an email and Outlook told me I could no longer send email because I was over my storage limit. This time, I actually read the entire pop-up message. And lo and behold...

SHIFT-DELETE was the answer to my problem and it was right there in the "bad bad person" message. WOW! Thougth I would pass that along just in case someone else has struggled with this problem for as long as I have (more in hopes that I am not the only clueless Outlook user).