How to Delete All Emails to Achieve Inbox Zero

Delete All Emails to Tame Your Inbox

Every day, over 300 billion email messages are sent and received worldwide. Out of these, around 50 percent are spam. It's no surprise many inboxes are cluttered, leaving users wondering if it's possible to delete all emails at once. The good news: it’s easy with the right tool.

You don’t have to go nuclear on your inbox, though. You can also learn how to delete multiple emails, focusing on specific categories like promotions, newsletters, or social media notifications. Whichever method you choose, it’s best to clean up your inbox soon, as hundreds of unwanted emails make it harder to focus on the important ones.

2. How to Delete All Emails on Gmail

Being the most popular email service in the world, Gmail is also the number one destination for spam messages. There are many Gmail users whose inboxes have accumulated so many unwanted messages that they’ve essentially become unusable.

Luckily, learning how to delete all emails on Gmail is quick and easy:

1. Log in to your Gmail account.
2. On the left side of your screen (if you are on desktop), select More.
3. Select the All Mail category if you want to delete all your emails.
4. Click the checkbox on the top left of your screen directly below the Gmail logo. Select the category such as All, Read, or Unread.

1. Click the blue text Select all … conversations in All Mail to select every message in your Gmail account.
2. Now click on the Trash icon to delete all selected emails.

While knowing how to delete all Gmail emails at once is a good start, you can also go a step or two further by learning how to delete all promotions in Gmail and how to unsubscribe from emails that you no longer wish to keep receiving—even if they don’t contain an unsubscribe link or don’t honor unsubscribe requests.

When you use a bulk email organization tool like Clean Email, it doesn’t matter how many messages you need to delete to achieve Inbox Zero, the state of your inbox when you have nothing in it that demands your attention, because the tool always does all the tedious, repetitive work for you.

3. How to Delete All Emails on Yahoo

First launched in 1997, Yahoo Mail is one of the oldest email services in the world. Despite its age, it’s still used by over 200 million users, many of which have been using the same email address for more than one decade. These Yahoo Mail veterans are often desperate to know if there’s a way to delete all emails in one go because they crave a fresh start.

Here’s a quick summary of how to delete all emails on Yahoo:

1. Log in to your Yahoo Mail account on web.
2. Choose the Inbox folder or any other folder which messages you want to be removed.
3. Click the checkbox at the top of your inbox and select all emails.
4. Double-check the messages to make sure you haven't selected anything important. Click Delete to get rid of the selected messages.

Alternatively, you can connect your Yahoo Mail account with a bulk email organizer like Clean Email (more about it at the end of this article) and use it to analyze your entire inbox with a few simple clicks. You can then tell Clean Email to delete all emails at once and use its powerful email organization features to stop new messages from cluttering up your inbox again.

4. How to Delete All Emails in Outlook

Outlook (the email service, not the email client) started in 1996 as Hotmail. Microsoft decided to relaunch it as Outlook.com in 2012, and it now has over 400 million users around the world. Even though Outlook is known for its overly sensitive spam filter, its users are certainly not immune to spam messages, and they deal with the same inbox overload issues as everyone else.

Learn how to start your Inbox Zero journey and delete all emails in Outlook with a few simple clicks:

1. Log in to your Outlook.com account.
2. Click the small checkmark above your emails to select all email messages at once or click the small icon next to each message you want to delete.
3. Click the Trash can icon located in the top toolbar to empty the selected folder.

In fact, you can just as easily delete multiple emails to selectively clean only unwanted messages and leave everything else behind. You can find more information on how to do this in our detailed guide on how to delete multiple emails in Outlook, which explains the topic in much greater detail than we could possibly go into here.

5. How to Delete AOL Emails

The AOL mail service provider comes from the Web 1.0 era, when web pages were static and comment sections non-existent. Despite being around for such a long time, AOL Mail has managed to remain relevant to this day, and its users can enjoy features such as support for up to 25 MB email attachments, built-in spam and virus protection, and integrated spell checking.

If you've been neglecting inbox maintenance and unwanted emails have piled up, making it hard to find legitimate messages, it might be time to delete all AOL emails and refresh your inbox:

1. Log in to your AOL Mail account.
2. Mark the boxes of the unwanted messages that you’d like to delete.
3. Click the Delete (trash icon) button to clear the folder.

You can also go to the following page to learn how to delete AOL emails using a free bulk email organizer. Once your AOL inbox is clean, you want to take certain steps to keep it that way. A capable email organizing app can automate common inbox management tasks, such as labeling new messages, moving them into specific folders, or archiving them, just to give you a few examples.

7. Delete All Emails on iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

iOS devices make it easy to read, write, and manage email messages on the go, but they can quickly become a major source of distraction, bombarding you with an endless barrage of notifications for messages you don’t really care about that much. What’s just as bad is that some unwanted messages are guaranteed to contain large attachments, which may take up valuable storage space on your device.

The solution? You need to learn how to delete all emails on iPhone and other iOS devices.

Here’s how:

1. Open the Mail app.
2. Go to any folder with messages you want to delete, e.g. choose the All Mail folder.
3. Select the Edit button located at the top of the screen.
4. Click Select All at the top of the screen.
5. Tap Trash on the bottom right.
6. Choose Trash All in the pop-up window to confirm.

While you can certainly delete all emails using the Mail app, it would probably take you a lot of time to achieve Inbox Zero, depending on the size of your inbox. It’s much faster, smarter, and overall more efficient to use a bulk inbox cleaner and let it automatically scrub your inbox clean.

When it comes to maintaining a clean inbox, we recommend you take advantage of the fact that your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch is always with you, so open each new message as soon as it arrives and delete it if there’s no reason to keep it in your inbox.

8. How to Delete All Emails at Once on Android

Android devices, both smartphones and tablets, make it easy to process your emails regardless of where you are or how many email addresses you're using. There's just one big problem with emailing on Android: inbox overload.

Unless you always diligently categorize all new email messages, you are almost guaranteed to end up with a cluttered inbox that's extremely difficult to use. At that point, deleting all emails at once on Android may be the best course of action.

Here's what you need to do if you use the Gmail app:

1. Open the Gmail app on your Android device.
2. Navigate to the folder that contains the emails you want to get rid of, or the All Mail folder to get rid of all emails.
3. Tap the circular icon to the left of the first message.
4. Scroll to the bottom of your All Mail folder to load all messages, then tap Select All.
5. Tap the Delete icon (trash can) to remove all the selected emails.

9. How to Delete All Emails on Mac

Are you used to reading and composing email messages using the Apple Mail app on your Mac? You’re not the only one. You also wouldn’t be the only Apple Mail user suffering from inbox overload and wondering how to delete all emails on Mac.

Fortunately, cleaning Mac Mail storage is very easy. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Launch the Apple Mail app by clicking on its dock icon.
2. If you have several mailboxes added to Apple Mail client, choose the mailbox which emails you want to delete.
3. Press command + A to select all messages.
4. Press the Trash can icon on the top bar to delete selected messages.

You can also learn how to delete multiple emails on Mac using Clean Email, our favorite bulk inbox cleaner. This app lets you instantly delete emails from any specific sender, and it comes with a ton of extra features to help you maintain your inbox in an organized state.

10. How to Delete Old Emails

When most users open a new message, they leave it in their inbox instead of categorizing it, moving it to the Archive folder, or deleting it. Over time, this habit can lead to major inbox clutter, so you should learn how to delete old emails in Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, AOL, and other service providers.

📌 As we describe in our comprehensive article on deleting old emails, most email services let you filter emails by date, making it easy to select only old emails and nothing else.

For example, you could choose to see only messages that have been sitting in your inbox for more than a year, which should be plenty of time for you to know that an email can be safely deleted.

11. How to Delete Emails from One Sender

All major service providers, including Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and AOL, let you filter emails by sender. This comes in handy when you want to delete all emails from one sender without deleting any other emails in the process.

Generally, all you have to do is enter the sender’s email address in the search box and click the Search button or hit Enter. Depending on the size of your inbox, it could take a while for search results to appear, so be patient.

From there, you simply need to select all found messages and click Delete.