How to delete all e-mails from a folder in iOS mail app

By peter, 23 October, 2022

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

I am using the Mail app and the latest iOS 16.

I have a particular folder in Mail with over 250 messages in it. I would like to delete them all.

After activating the Edit button, I do not see any option to “select All” for marking, deleting, etc. I can only select messages one at a time by double tapping with Voiceover. This seems to be an impossibly tedious task. There must be an easier way of selecting all messages in the Mail app as there is in the Messages app, but I can’t find it.

Any ideas how to do this more easily using Voiceover?

Thanks.

—Pete

Options

Comments

By Steve Mann on Sunday, October 23, 2022 - 17:50

You used to be able to do that a number of years ago, but from something like 2017 on up, what you're wanting to do has been impossible with the mail app, as Apple removed that ability, to the best of my knowledge.

By Bruce Harrell on Sunday, October 23, 2022 - 19:28

I haven't tried it on my iPhone yet, but if you have a Mac, open mail, open the mail folder, press command a, and press the delete key. If you're using iCloud, deleting them from your Mac should also result in them disappearing from your iPhone.

Good luck.

By peter on Sunday, October 23, 2022 - 21:01

Unfortunately, I am on the road and using an iPhone. My main PC is home. These messages keep piling up while I’m on the road and I’d like to clean out this folder. Oh well.

Maybe when I get back, I’ll make a suggestion to Apple 30 include such a feature since I think said people can do this someway.

– – Pete

By kool_turk on Monday, October 24, 2022 - 05:45

I'm glad I'm not the only one having this problem.

I don't have 200 messages to delete, but it is a pain to delete them one by one.

Gmail does not have this problem.

By Katie P on Monday, October 24, 2022 - 11:25

I was just doing this the other day. The select all button seems to be available, um well, in select places.
I noticed that if I was in the inbox, junk, drafts, or trash for a spicific account I had select all.
However, that option is not their when organizing the main unified inbox, or custom folders.
For whatever it is worth, I hope this helps somehow.
I do agree that manually selecting each message one at a time is overwhelming.

By Dawn 👩🏻‍🦯 on Monday, October 24, 2022 - 14:12

There's a button that got introduced in I think 13. It has become my new best friend and it will be yours too. That button AKA. is the Select All button. If you hit edit, and then swipe until you hear select all, and double-tap. Then you can choose what to do with those emails in bulk. I use this the most for my Junk/Spam folder! You'll find other select all buttons throughout other stock apps and 3rd party apps.

By Sebby on Monday, October 24, 2022 - 15:48

Not sure I understand. The select all button is the first element once you press Edit, and that's true whatever folder I'm in, at least the Inbox folder and all other custom (not smart) folders. Is that not what you have?

By peter on Tuesday, October 25, 2022 - 02:56

Thanks to some of the comments here, I think I figured out what is going on with selecting all messages and why some people seem to see the "select all" button when editing and some not.

From doing some experimentation, I see that when I have the "Filter" option turned off and then activate the "Edit" button in the list of mail messages, then the "Select All" button will be shown in the dialog for all folders including sub folders of an account.

If, on the other hand, you have the Filter set (as I do) to show only Unread mesages, then when you activate the "Edit" button then the "Select all" option will not be shown for any folders or sub folders, including the Inbox.

thus, if you really want to select all of the mesages in a folder and delete them, then you are able to do that. However, if you only show, for example, "Unread" messages and want to select all of the unread mesages for deletion, then that is not an option.

Too bad. Seems like a simple option to enable. I will suggest this to Apple Accessibility.

Thanks again to all who commented since that gave the clue as to what was going on.

--Pete

By peter on Tuesday, October 25, 2022 - 17:58

Based on this thread and my experimentation I posted a suggestion to Apple Accessibility (although this isn't really an accessibility issue).

The suggestion was to have the "Select All" button be available in the dialog that pops up after activating the Edit button in the Appple Mail app regardless of how the Filter option is set for the list of messages in the folder. Currently, the "Select All" button will only appear after activating the Edit button if the Filter is not active.

Hopefully if this is implmented it will not only avoid the confusion we've seen here, but it will also make it easier and more efficient to delete large chunks of messages based on the filter options one has selected.

--Pete

By peter on Wednesday, October 26, 2022 - 18:12

Here is the response from Apple Accesibility when I described the issue to them:

"Thank you for your emails. You are correct that the Select All button does not appear after activating the Edit function in Mail, if you have a filter active. We appreciate the suggestion and have passed along the request to the appropriate teams for consideration."

So this explains what is going on and we'll see what happens, if anything, in future releases.

--Pete