According to recent statistics, global spam volume represents around 60 percent of total email traffic volume. It’s no wonder then that iPhone users are looking for ways how to efficiently clean up their inboxes and reclaim all lost storage space. In this article, we introduce several methods how to delete all emails on iPhone, some of them more time-consuming than others.
Get Started for FreeFearing the users of the Mail app might accidentally delete every single email they’ve ever received, Apple decided not to include a select all button and make it easy for users to get rid of all emails at once. But just because deleting all emails on iPhone isn’t easy doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.
In fact, all it takes to delete all emails at once on iPhone are a few simple steps that anyone can complete in less than a minute:
As you’ve probably already noticed, this method has one major limitation: it only works with one folder at a time. While that’s not really a problem if you keep your emails in just one folder, it can become quite annoying to repeat the same steps over and over again with multiple folders.
Removing an email account from the Mail app is arguably the simplest way how to instantly mass delete emails on iPhone. Yes, this option is what some would call “nuclear” as it means that you will no longer be able to receive new emails.
Don’t worry: removing your email account from your iPhone doesn’t delete the email account itself. You will still be able to access all your emails from the web or using a different email app. Removing your email account from your iPhone also doesn’t delete the emails from the server—only from your iPhone.
Although being very time-consuming, removing emails individually gives you the most control over which emails you keep and which you remove. This method is best for those with relatively small inboxes, but we wouldn’t recommend it for anyone else. Today. There are much better ways how to delete emails on iPhone, including those described later in this article. But if you want to prune your inbox one-by-one, this is how to do it:
Usually, it’s easy to tell which emails can be deleted just by reading the subject. If your inbox consists of a mix of personal conversations and marketing garbage, you might find it useful to know how to delete multiple emails at once:
This will move your emails to the Trash folder. To delete them from the Trash folder, navigate to it and repeat the process. Yes, this means that you have to repeat the same procedure twice, but the second round should be quicker since the Trash folder contains only the email you wish to delete.
Sometimes, emails are just one of many things taking up free space. If you would like to erase your iPhone completely, you can do so by performing a factory reset to delete all data and settings. We strongly recommend you make a backup beforehand because otherwise you couldn’t go back and restore your iPhone to how it was before.
Some senders don’t know when enough is enough. If you have a colleague who always writes ten emails to say one thing, or if you’ve ended up on a subscription list of a business with a marketing department that’s way too eager to show the boss that it deserves its budget, you know who we’re talking about.
By deleting all emails from the most active senders, you can easily free up gigabytes of email storage space and make your inbox far more organized. Even though the iOS Mail app doesn’t make it obvious how to delete all emails from one sender, the process isn’t too complicated, and all you need to do is follow the steps below:
You can now repeat the process with other senders.
If you want to learn how to delete all emails in Gmail on iPhone, we have bad news for you: the iOS Gmail app doesn't have any feature that makes it possible to delete all emails at once. Because of this serious limitation, which Google doesn't seem to be eager to fix, we have to take a different approach and delete multiple Gmail emails from the desktop version of Gmail.
To access the desktop version of Gmail on iPhone:
Once you have the desktop version of Gmail opened in Safari, you can delete all emails using the following steps:
Yahoo Mail features an inbox cleaner whose sole purpose is to archive old emails so they don't clutter your inbox. To use the inbox cleaner:
Depending on how many emails you have, it may take some time for the task to finish, so be patient. If you want to go a step further and delete the archived emails, here are the detailed steps:
All the above-described email cleanup methods have their limitations. If your inbox contains years’ worth of emails from many different senders—some worth keeping and some not—neither deleting everything at once nor deleting individual emails one-by-one is a good option. Instead, we recommend Clean Email for iOS, which is a powerful email cleanup utility designed to help you organize, remove, label, and archive your emails with a simple click.
Clean Email is smart. It can understand and automatically sort out your inbox without infringing on your privacy. By analyzing email headers that contain subject line, sender and recipient information, dates, email size, and similar metadata, Clean Email groups similar emails together, allowing you to manage them in bulk without any effort at all.
For example, it can separate bounced emails notifications from notifications from project management tools, large emails from emails from dead ends, junk emails and spam from social network notifications, emails you’ve sent to yourself from emails you replied to, or subscriptions and newsletters from finance emails, and much more. Clean Email also has the so-called Smart Unsubscribe feature to make sure that newsletters, unwanted subscriptions, and other unwanted emails will not show up in your mailbox.
In other words, Clean Email is a one-stop-shop for email management, and we strongly recommend it anyone who is wondering how to delete emails on iPhone. Best of all, Clean Email supports a number of different email services, including but not limited to Gmail and other services that use a protocol called OAuth2 to control inbox access.
With a clean inbox, your next goal should be to maintain Zero Inbox. To achieve it, we recommend you deal with new emails as soon as possible and immediately unsubscribe from any newsletter you don’t want to receive. If you’re inbox gets out of hand anyway, you can always run Clean Email again and easily go back to Zero Inbox.
It’s also useful to have a dedicated inbox for marketing emails, so you can delete it entirely from time to time and keep your main inbox cleaner.
Clean Email is built to work from any device and for all email clients, with additional functionalities and support added on a regular basis as new services emerge and new devices become available. One Clean Email subscription covers your mailbox across ALL your devices!
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