[Update Feb 24, 2020: This bug has been patched in a recent version of iOS and is no longer functional.]
Whether you meticulously keep your mailbox clean or you leave thousands of unread messages lying there, you may just end up wanting to delete all of those emails at one point or another. The problem comes in when you need to delete a bunch of emails at once.
Apple’s native Mail app does a good job at organizing and storing emails, but in recent versions of iOS, the company has made it a bit harder to delete multiple emails in one go.
In iOS 9, Apple added the ability to Trash All — delete all emails in an inbox in just a few taps. But in iOS 10 and newer versions of the mobile operating system, this option has disappeared.
That has made it a bit more difficult to batch-delete emails from Mail. But it isn’t impossible. Here are a couple of ways to go about it.
How to Delete Multiple Emails on iPhone or iPad
If you only have a few dozen emails, you’ll probably be best off by simply selecting them individually.
- Open the Mail app on your iOS device.
- Go to the Inbox or mailbox you’d like to delete messages from.
- Tap on Edit in the upper-right corner.
- Manually tap on each message you’d like to delete.
- Select Trash in the bottom-right corner to send those emails to the trash.
How to Delete Hundreds of Emails at Once on iPhone or iPad
On the other hand, the method above just isn’t very feasible if you have a couple hundred (or thousand) emails in an inbox or mailbox. But there is a nifty trick that can help you do away with all of them.
Keep in mind that this will delete all of the emails in that particular mailbox. So proceed with caution. Otherwise, it may be a good idea to select only the emails you’d like to delete individually.
Be sure to move any and all important emails to a separate, safe folder before continuing.
- Open the Mail app on your iOS device.
- Go to the Inbox or mailbox you’d like to delete messages from.
- Tap on Edit in the upper-right corner.
- Tap on one email in the inbox.
- Tap and hold the Move button at the bottom of the screen — don’t lift your finger up just yet.
- With another finger, deselect the email that you tapped previously.
- Now, release your first finger from the Move button.
- This bug will cause all emails in the inbox to be selected at once, so you can tap Trash to delete them all in one fell swoop.