How To Unflag All Emails On iPhone And iPad

How to Unflag All Emails on iPhone Manually

When you flag an email, it gets marked with either a flag (in Apple Mail or Outlook) or a star (in Gmail or Yahoo). Flagging can serve as a helpful reminder to check back on the message later. It draws attention to important emails, helping you avoid inbox blindness and ensuring you don’t miss key messages.

However, because flagging is as simple as a click, you might accidentally flag non-priority messages. Unflagging them can help you organize your inbox and keep the email settings on your iPhone tidy.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to unflagging emails in the default mail client for Apple, the Apple Mail app, covering iOS 14, iOS 15, iOS 16, iOS 17, iOS 18, and devices like the iPhone 2018, iPhone 2019, iPhone 2020, iPhone 2021, iPhone 2022, or even the latest iPhone 2024 models.

1. Open the Apple Mail app.
2. Go to your Flagged mailbox. You can find it under Mailboxes.
3. Click Select in the upper right-hand corner.
4. Choose the emails you want to unflag by clicking the circle next to each message.
5. Once done, tap Mark at the bottom of the screen.
6. Choose Unflag from the list of options.

This will remove the flag labels from the emails you selected. However, if you have hundreds of flagged messages, you’ll need to click each one individually, which can be tedious and time-consuming.

⚠️ If you’re wondering how to unflag emails on iPhone all at once, there’s no direct option to do so using the Mail app—unless you scroll through and select them manually, which can take a while if you have hundreds of flagged emails.

How to Unflag All Emails on iPhone Using the Gmail App

If you use the Gmail app on your iPhone, you might have noticed that instead of "flagging" emails, Gmail uses a "star" system. Starring an email in Gmail works much like flagging in Apple Mail because it helps you mark important messages for quick access later. Here’s how to unflag all emails on iPhone in the Gmail app.

1. Open the Gmail app.
2. Tap the Menu icon (the three stacked lines) in the top-left corner.
3. Scroll down and click the Starred label to see all your starred emails.
4. Unstar emails by clicking the star next to each message.

⚠️ While you can manually remove stars from multiple messages this way, there’s no option to unstar all emails at once in the Gmail mobile app on iPhones. For users who have dozens (or hundreds) of starred emails, clicking each one individually is time-consuming.

How to Unflag All Emails on iPad

If you’re working from an iPad, the process to unflag emails is very similar to what you’d do on an iPhone. The difference is you’re just working with a slightly larger interface and a few layout changes depending on your device model.

Here’s how to unflag emails directly in the iPad Mail app. These steps should work whether you’re using an iPad Air, iPad mini, or iPad Pro.

1. Open the Mail app.
2. Tap Mailboxes in the sidebar and select Flagged.
3. In the upper right, click Edit.
4. Choose the messages you want to unflag by tapping the circle next to each one.
5. Click Mark at the bottom of the screen.
6. Choose Unflag to remove the flags from the selected emails.

While the larger screen makes it a little easier to navigate through emails compared to an iPhone, the same limitation applies. The Mail app doesn’t offer a Select All option inside the Flagged folder.

How to Unflag Multiple Emails on iPhone in Other Apps

Not everyone sticks to just the Apple Mail app or Gmail. If you’re using other email apps on your iPhone (like Outlook, Yahoo Mail, or even accessing Hotmail or iCloud Mail through Safari) you’ll find that unflagging multiple messages isn’t always straightforward.

In the Outlook app, for example, you can remove flags by taking the following steps:

1. Open the app, tap Filter, and choose Flagged.
2. Tap the messages you want to unflag.

💡 Note: In the Outlook mobile app, you can select one message, then tap Select All to unflag all flagged messages at once.

3. Tap the crossed-out flag icon to remove the flag.

For Yahoo Mail, the process for unflagging emails is as follows:

1. Opening Yahoo Mail and clicking the Starred filter at the top.
2. Selecting messages you want to unstar.
3. Tapping More.
4. Clicking Unstar.

💡 Similar to Outlook, Yahoo also offers a bulk unflagging feature on mobile.

If you’re accessing Hotmail or iCloud Mail via Safari, the experience isn’t much better. You can remove flags by:

1. Signing in to your email through your browser.
2. Using filters to show flagged items.
3. Clicking each message or using a multi-select option to remove the flags.

However, mobile web versions tend to be clunky and slow, especially if you’re trying to manage a large number of emails on the go.

Troubleshooting

Flags sometimes stick, reset, or show the wrong count. This is usually caused by known Apple Mail and IMAP quirks rather than user error. Here are the most common issues and how to fix them.

❌ Unflagged emails still appear in the Flagged mailbox

This is usually a Mail indexing glitch, not a failed unflag. The message is unflagged, but the mailbox hasn't refreshed. To fix it:

1. Pick one stuck message, flag it again, then unflag it.
2. Force-close the Mail app and reopen it.
3. If it's still there, restart your iPhone to rebuild the flagged index.

❌ A flag won't come off no matter what

Occasionally a single message ignores every Unflag tap. The reliable workaround:

1. Unflag the message, then delete it.
2. Restart the Mail app so the change registers.
3. Move the email back from Trash to its original folder.

❌ Flag colors keep resetting to red

If you set purple or blue and it snaps back to red, you're almost certainly on an IMAP account (Gmail, iCloud, Outlook). Custom flag colors often aren't stored server-side over IMAP, so they revert on sync.

⚠️ This isn't a fault with your iPhone, it's a limitation of how different providers implement IMAP flags. Colors tend to hold better on locally stored (POP) accounts.

❌ Stars and flags don't sync with Gmail

Gmail treats "Starred" as an IMAP label, so if stars aren't showing up in Apple Mail (or vice versa), the label may be hidden from IMAP.

1. Open Gmail settings in a browser → Labels.
2. Find Starred and enable Show in IMAP.
3. If sync is still broken, unstar everything in Gmail on the web, then re-star what you need to force a fresh sync.

❌ The Flagged mailbox is missing or empty

The Flagged mailbox only appears once you have at least one flagged message, and an active filter can hide flagged items from view. Tap Edit on the Mailboxes screen to make sure Flagged is turned on, and clear any filter (the funnel icon at the bottom) before checking the count.

Still stuck? Make sure you're on the latest iOS version, and toggle the account off and on under Settings → Mail → Accounts to force a clean resync.