how to mass delete emails on gmail app

Does your Gmail icon have a red blob with a 4-digit number in its top-right corner?

How To Delete All of Your Gmail E-Mails from Your iPhone

If you've been using Gmail for a while, there's a high chance the answer is 'yes'. No matter how hard you try to stay away from all kinds of mailing lists, Gmail clutter is bound to happen at some point. If you use it for business purposes, this will likely happen sooner than later.

So what do you do in this situation? Unfortunately, the iOS version of the Gmail app doesn't allow you to delete all emails. There's no such feature native to the app, so you'll have to find another approach. First, let's take a look at what you can do from within the app.

Deleting Multiple Gmail Emails

When it comes to email deletion, the iOS Gmail app isn't really feature-rich. You can either delete each email separately or select multiple emails and delete them. The issue with the second option is that you have to select each email manually, which could take a huge amount of time, or for some even an eternity.

Still, if this is the way you want to go about this, here's what you have to do:

Open the Gmail app on your iPhone.
Choose a folder where the emails are located.
In the list of emails, tap on the round thumbnail representing the user's profile. This will turn the thumbnails into checkboxes.
Select the email or emails that you want to remove, then tap the trash can icon at the top of the screen.

As you can see, this is very easy to do but it's far from a convenient way of removing all your Gmail emails. This is why if you really want to do this, you're going to have to use the desktop version of Gmail.

Deleting All Emails on Gmail on a Desktop

Now, this is where things get easy. The desktop or web version of Gmail includes a very convenient way of removing all the unwanted emails in no time. Let's take a look at how it works.

Open Gmail in your web browser.
Go to the folder from which you want to remove all emails.
Click on the Select All checkbox in the top right corner of the screen. You'll have selected all the emails on the page. To select all emails in the folder, go to Select all XXX conversations in Folder .
Click the trash can icon to move the selected emails into the Trash Folder.

If you don't have too many folders, it shouldn't take long to delete all of your Gmail emails one folder at a time. Everything you do on the desktop version of Gmail will automatically sync with the app on all your devices, which happens the next time you open the app when there's an internet connection.

Deleting All Gmail Emails from a Specific Category

Aside from deleting all emails, there are easy ways to choose a particular group or category of emails to delete. Let's say you have one contact that swarms you with emails you never read. In this case, what you can do is simply delete all emails from that one user.

To do this, just hover over their name and a pop-up window will appear.

Click on the Emails button and you'll get a list that contains only the emails from that user. You can then delete them by following the steps described in the previous section.

You can also use the search bar and the Label function to select emails for deletion. For example, if you type in label:unread , you'll get a list of all your unread emails, which you can then delete in a couple of clicks.

You can enter pretty much any other label and filter the emails, such as the user, email contents, different folders, and many other criteria.

If you have a lot of spam or promotional emails you can type the sender into the search bar to narrow those down. Once filtered, you can continue to delete them all. It's also a good idea to mark the unsubscribe option for each sender to ensure they don't fill your mailbox up again.

Remove the Red Notification

For those who don't want to delete all of their emails, there's another simple option. Thanks to Apple's user-friendly interface, you can customize the way you receive notifications. The red notification is actually called a 'badge'. To remove these badges, follow these steps:

Open 'Settings' on your iPhone
Scroll down and tap on 'Notifications'
Locate Gmail in your list of options (they should be listed alphabetically)
Toggle the badges option off so that it turns grey.

If you'd like to avoid taking the time to delete your messages, this will turn off the annoying and persistent red notifications.

Mark All As Read

For those using Apple's mail app to monitor and control their Gmail account, there are a few things you can do to get rid of the red blob and constant reminder that you have a lot of emails.

You can mark all as read using the app:

Open the Mail app on your phone.
Tap Edit in the upper right-hand corner.
Tap Select All in the upper left-hand corner.
At the bottom, select Mark.
A menu will appear with the "Flag" and Mark as Read options – Tap Mark as Read.

Although this doesn't delete your emails, it does remove the red notification.

The Final Word

Sadly, the iOS Gmail app is lacking some of the convenience features that users need. Mass deletion is definitely among the most important since it's a problem that plagues many Gmail users.

Thankfully, the desktop version comes to the rescue. As you could see, it's very easy to get rid of every mail one folder at a time.

If you need more iPhone or Gmail tutorials, feel free to post your question in the comments section below. And if Google makes the mass delete feature available, we'll let you know.