A lot has changed from 2013, but not so much in the way of ease of deleting emails on your iPhone or iPad. Back then, I managed to find some undocumented information that helped me in deleting all my emails which I outlined here. However with multiple version updates and several years, the “Mail” application still has features that require you to do a little digging.
Now, to Apple’s credit, deleting all emails was a little bit easier. There was a simple Trash All button in some previous versions and updates. However those features have gone away and there is a more hands on method. In fact there are two methods.
First Method: Removal Through Multiple Selection
The Trash All button was such a time saver, however as soon as you update your phone to any iOS 11 or iOS 12 versions, that feature is gone. That being said not all hope is lost and there is a way to delete multiple or all emails on your iPhone with relative ease. All you need to do is the following:
- Launch the “Mail” App.
- Go to the folder you plan to delete mail from and click on the “Edit” button in the top right corner.
- Manually select every single email you wish to delete (sadly there is no select all) followed by selecting “Trash” or “Archive” in the bottom right corner.
- Finally confirm the action by selecting “Trash/Archive Selected Messages”
This method is good, however it’s not that helpful if you have stored hundreds of emails. If you’re in that camp, consider the second method.
Second Method: Moving Emails to A New Folder and Deleting All Emails
Technically speaking there is a delete all emails on your iPhone method, though it’s only permitted on specific folders. The idea is to move emails from one folder and move it into Trash or Junk folder which do have a remove feature. Here is how it works:
- Launch the “Mail” App.
- Go to Inbox, Sent or Draft folder and then tap “Edit” and select one email.
- From there, press and hold the “Move” button at the bottom and uncheck the email you just selected. Make absolutely sure you do not release your finger from that button until you’ve unchecked all the emails you checked off before.
- A new screen will show up allowing you to move all emails from one folder to another folder. From there, you can select Junk or Trash.
- Once all the emails have been moved to the Trash or Junk folder, you can go into that selected folder and click “Edit”. There should be an option to “Delete All” or “Trash All.”
The Mail app made a big leap in the past only to regress a little bit in recent versions. But just like with most apps on Apple, they are always looking to making tweaks and adjustments and maybe we’ll get some of the better features that Mail had in iOS 10 someday.