Strange iOs mail question

Have you tried accessing that e-mail inbox from a Mac? If so, have you tried the menu bar edit pulldown deselect all (command-A), followed by a delete or a move to junk or a move to trash? Have you tried calling the e-mail provider to see if they can delete everything in one swell foop from their end? Have you tried MacOS Apple Mail preferences message rules to automatically move everything into trash or some other folder? Have you called Apple technical support accessibility for help? Do you have trouble going to sleep at night so that deleting these one at a time might put you to sleep? Have you considered deleting your inbox and then setting it up again? Have you investigated setting up a brand new e-mail address and starting fresh? Have you tried deleting the account altogether and then creating it all over again?

Just off the top of my head. Hope something works.

Joy!

Bruce

Hi. I had a similar situation to yours. I hadn't cleaned out my ipad inbox, and by the time I got to it, I had 700 messages in there! Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way to be rid of them all at once.
I wish that there was a function with drag and drop where you could flick down to drag and then you could drag all emails to a folder. And that you could go in, mark all messages, then select an action in the rotor to drag all marked mail. Then you could put all dragged/marked mail in a folder. I'm afraid I don't have a way to rid you of all messages at once. But, if anyone else on here knows a way, I'd love to hear about it too!

On the top right is the edit button which you need to touch. Then, double tap on one message at a time. After say, 20 or 30 messages, click on move messages which is at the bottom. Select the junk folder and double tap. Your inbox will be fewer by that number of messages. Do it whenever you have some time to spare. Eventually, it will be history.

Two things I don't like about the iOS Mail app:

1. There really should be a "select all" option when editing the list of mail messages. It is crazy to think that one should have to select each of many, many messages individually in order to clear a folder.

2. I still can't believe that, when opening the list of folders associated with an e-mail account, the entire list of folders and sub-folders is expanded and there is no way to collapse individual sub-folders. This might have been okay for e-mail a decade ago when people might not have had lots and lots of sub-folders into which they organized their messages. But these days people are a lot more sophisticated about how they use mail and are likely to have a complex structure of folders and sub-folders. Again, crazy that this all has to be expanded and we have to scroll through a pile of folders and sub-folders to find the sub-folder we are looking for!

I've written to Apple several times through the years about these two issues but nothing has changed. Hopefully we'll get a more modern mail itnerface in iOS some day.

--Pete
a bout

There is currently no select all button, but there is a bug to take advantage of. Open the mail app and go to inbox. Double tap on edit, then double tap on the first message to select it. Now here's where it gets tricky. Feel around to find the selected message and the move button. Once you have located both, turn off voice-over and place and hold your finger on the move button. Finally, single tap on the selected message first, then let go of the move button and turn on voice-over. If done correctly, it should tell you the number of selected messages. Now you can just trash and delete them.

I'm with you Peter! I may not have sub folders for my email, but I think there should be a delete all button like the 1 in junk mail for ALL folders.

One thing you may want to try though is if the provider has an app, download it and see if it has that feature. Or if there's a 3rd party mail client that has that feature and is accessible, I'd say grab it, and put this account in it, and use it. Not the best, but it's better than having 2097 messages.

I hit the Edit button in my Inbox and saw a Mark All button. Does it not work? There's also a Trash button right there.

ETA: The Mark All button appears to be for flagging messages. Why would you want to mark them all, though? It *is* strange to have to delete bulk messages one by one.

No, I don't think it works to hit the edit button and choose "mark all". When you bring up the "mark all"
option, the only choices are "Flag" or "mark Read/UnRead". There is no "select". It is unbelievable that Apple doesn't have a simple way to select all messages and then delete them or send them to the trash.

--Pete

Double tap on it to select it.

Hope it's clearer now.