I am new to mac. just purchaased it 3 weeks ag along with MS office for mac, i notice that all my outlook email are in this finder folder, can i delete these email files from this location? why are they there anyway?

Question

I am new to mac. just purchaased it 3 weeks ag along with MS office for mac, i notice that all my outlook email are in this finder folder, can i delete these email files from this location? why are they there anyway?

Answer 1

Cherry63 wrote:
I am talking about the icon on the docking row, that's the guy with the smily face. When you click on him it brings up a bunch of files of what I seem to have store/created on my Imac. There are hundreds of emails and some other documents. I tried to delete a few of them when I first got the MS office but it did not like that, it said it have to rebuild oulook. Why cant i delete these files? is this Apple version of Window outlook PST files?
These file extenssions are listed as
olk14_message or even or ccontact. I wish I could send a screen print but I dont see that on the key board. Maybe I should have stuck with windows..
Oh the ...olk14_message's.  Do not delete them behind Outlooks back, i.e., from the finder.  Those are the various messages that you sent, received, or deleted in Outlook.  They are indexed by Outlook so if you delete behind Outlook's back Outlook will get confused trying to access those messages.
You can delete them however using Outlook itself.  In outlook select a mailbox (Drafts, Sent Items, Deleted Items, etc.) by clicking on the mailbox on the left.  It will show you the messages in that mailbox.  You can now select all or selected items in that mailbox.  The click the Edit menu and select Delete.  You will get a dialog asking if you really want to delete the selections.  Answer "Delete" and the messages will get deleted.
The olk14_message's you are seeing are the actual messages shown the Outlook mail boxes.  When you actually delete them the way I just described the corresponding olk14_message files will also be deleted.
Note Outlook's Deleted Items mailbox is where all deleted messages go when you click the Delete tool in the Outlook toolbar.   Thus using the Delete tool from the toolbar does not permanently delete the messages.  So if you been using that for months or years you are going to have a very large Deleted Items mailbox.  And every one of those items in there is going to have a corresponding olk14_message file for that message.
So if those olk14_message files you are seeing are from the Deleted Items mailbox you can get rid of all those corresponding olk14_message files by selecting all the messages in Deleted Items and using the Edit menu's Delete.
Alternative ways to the Edit/Delete to do the permanent delete is select (all) the messages to delete and control (right) click to bring up the Outlook contextual menu and select Delete from it.
Finally if you use the Delete tool in the toolbar for messages selected in the Deleted Items mailbox you will be able to permanently delete those too.  It's an exception since using the tool on the Deleted Items means there's no place to put those messages except to "oblivion".
So, in summary, using the Delete tool in the toolbar on messages in every mailbox except the Deleted Items mailbox just moves messages to the Deleted Items mailbox.  But using the Delete tool on items in them Deleted Items mailbox permanently deletes the selected items in there.  And only permanently deleting items removes the corresponding actual ...olk14_message files.