Live Mail 2012 Can't delete emails

[Donald McGuckin]

I have a number of emails in my Live Mail Inbox and Junk Mail fodders which I cannot delete. Whichever method I use to delete them, I get a Windows Live Mail error message, "An unknown error has occurred." I have repaired Windows Essentials twice, but the error persists; any thoughts please?

 

[Trouble]

Hello Donald and welcome to the forum.
I believe that, as of recently, Windows Live Mail has pretty much lost the ability to "sync" actions relating to mail, calendar and contacts for any of the following email accounts.
live.com, outlook.com, Hotmail.com, msn.com and probably a couple others that I can't remember right now.
I can't say for certain that, that is what you are experiencing as I myself quit using it a while back when Microsoft made the announcement that because of the new method that their email services were going to start using to sync, was going to stop working with Live Mail.
You should still be able to use the web interface to access and manage your mail through most browsers so you might try that method to perform any cleanup that is needed.

 

[Regedit32]

Hi Donald,

Welcome to the Forum.

Based on your efforts it sounds like one or more of the emails you are trying to delete are corrupted, or possibly a ghost image from some form of syncing issue, which could occur if you previously deleted the email via a web browser and then later when opening Windows Live Mail GUI on computer the syncing from this to the online server somehow failed.

Something you could attempt though is to delete the unwanted emails directly from their Storage folders, rather than from withing the WLM GUI. To do that do the following:

• Open File Explorer
• In the Address bar of File Explorer type or copy & paste the following:
  
  

  %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail

  
  Press Enter key to open to the location just typed above.
  
  Sample Image
  
  
  

• You'll now see a list of folders and files. One of these folders will have the Account Name or ISP name of where you email address comes from. Open that folder.
• Now you will see your storage folders, Inbox, Sent, Junk etcetera.
  
  Simply open the relevant folder, locate the mail message you don't want and right-click > Delete
  
  Note: Ensure the Windows Live Mail GUI you normally use to access these folders is not running when doing this (i.e. close the WLM application first).

Other than that a couple of other ways you may be able to delete the unwanted mails in your actual email program, is to:

• left-click and drag email to Deleted items folder, or
• select unwanted email then mark as unread then delete

Regards,

Regedit32

 

[davehc]

I have needed to move on from Windows Live Mail, for the reasons stated by Trouble.

Bot, the problem is not connected with the lack of sync, it is a random occurrence and, I would put it down as an unsolved bug.
The first operation for deleting them has been successful, but the computer/mail program has not recorded it. The easiest way I found, was to drag and drop them into the deleted folder. It will be , possibly, only one of the mails which is causing the problem, so you may find, if you have a number of them, that you will hit on the baddy and from then it iwill begin to operate normally again.
You can, if you wish, hold the shift key and select the messages one by one, until you get a popup saying a particular one cannot be selected.