how to delete thousands of emails

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Deleting Thousands and Thousands of Emails

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A friends gmail accounts has tens of thousands of emails that I'm trying to clean. My first approach is to delete all those that have been tagged as/put in Promotions and Social. But I can't get past only selecting all those emails on my screen (Select All). If there are 4K emails in Promotions I'm never going to do it - I need to be able to actually select everything. I've tried various ways of actually selecting all the emails but each time it only seems to select those visible on my screen. Any advise on the best method to use to delete thousands of email would be appreciated. (Is logging in to the server via a browser going to achieve this - or do I need to contact the server admin team?).

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score -66 · Accepted Answer

Hi Quark Rad!

First, the task is by far the easiest if you use a computer and web browser. Mobile devices are best for small quantities of actions.

The following is the general approach to doing mass deletions. Steps 2-4 assume a search is being done, so you can just skip those steps given yo are using filters for things like Promotions etc. Step 6 is where mass deletion of more than 1 page (50) at a time is documented.

To mass delete emails:

First open to your Gmail webpage interface
Using the Search box at the top, look down to the Search settings near the bottom of the box.
Ensure that All Mail is selected
Click Search
If you wish to selectively delete, use the checkbox beside each email to selectively choose emails for deletion.
1. Use the master check box at the top of the page to select all emails on that page
2. Press/choose the Trash icon to delete
  1. Remember to purge your Gmail Trash if you do not wish to wait 30 days for the emails to be permanently deleted.
    1. Remember permanently deleted emails cannot be recovered- so be careful!
If you wish to mass delete, or if you have more than 1 page of results, and you are very very sure that you wish to select all the found results:
1. Use the master check box at the top of the page to select all the emails on that page
2. Now a new option is shown below that master check box: All 50 conversations on this page are selected. Select all conversations that match this search.Click that to expand to include all found emails, not just the 50.
3. Click the option to select all conversations found
4. Press/choose the Trash icon to delete
  1. Remember to purge your Gmail Trash if you do not wish to wait 30 days for the emails to be permanently deleted.
    1. Remember permanently deleted emails cannot be recovered- so be careful!

Again, please be very careful in just blowing away these emails!

Looking forward to seeing your replies!

how to delete thousands of emails