How do I delete a massive sms thread?

[Niotic]

I have a thread of text messages that is close to 50k messages....yea. I have been trying to delete them all but my phone is just not having it. I've tried doing it with the stock messenger, GO SMS Pro, textra, chomp and handcent. Every time the phone ends up crashing or freezing as this is a sh*t ton of memory.

I've also tried SMS Quick Delete and MN Record Cleaner with no luck. My most recent attempt consists of accessing my phone through my computer via a usb cord and trying to delete the messages that way but I can only do them one by one.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S4 running 4.4.2 .

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks a ton in advance!

 

[Greg C]

I have a thread of text messages that is close to 50k messages....yea. I have been trying to delete them all but my phone is just not having it. I've tried doing it with the stock messenger, GO SMS Pro, textra, chomp and handcent. Every time the phone ends up crashing or freezing as this is a sh*t ton of memory.

I've also tried SMS Quick Delete and MN Record Cleaner with no luck. My most recent attempt consists of accessing my phone through my computer via a usb cord and trying to delete the messages that way but I can only do them one by one.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S4 running 4.4.2 .

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks a ton in advance!

So... when you open whatever text app you use you should see a list of text messages sent to different people. Long Click on the message group you want to delete. You should have an option to choose Delete. If that doesn't work try going to APLICATIONS... choose your messaging app... press Clear DATA and also clear the CACHE. I hope this works... let me know.

 

[Niotic]

Well yea dude, I'm not an *****. I know how to delete a message thread. When I go to delete the thread the screen just comes up the with DELETING window and I wait, and wait and wait some more until the phone freezes or the application crashes. If you read my post this was all in there....? I have also cleared the data and cache but this still does nothing.

 

[Mooncatt]

If the app or phone is crashing, that's obviously an issue. You also say it sometimes just freezes. How long do you wait before intervening when it's frozen? I've deleted several thousand in one go and it freezes the phone for several minutes until it's deleted them all. The phone isn't needing to be rebooted or anything, it just takes a fair bit of time to process that amount of data. Since you didn't say how long you waited while the phone appeared frozen, I wouldn't rule out that possibility.

You may also want to see if any of your messaging apps have a batch mode, or equivalent, that lets you delete many texts at once without deleting the entire thread. Handcent has that option. You go into the thread and activate batch mode. Then you check every individual text you want to delete, then it'll delete that batch in one shot. You can delete smaller batches over time until the remaining total is something you can wipe by deleting the entire thread. I know it'll still be a bit time consuming having to check off a bunch at a time, but it's better than deleting them one by one.

Another option you may try is see if you can set your app to auto-delete texts after a certain amount. It's a long shot, but if you have 50K texts and set it to keep only 48K, it may then delete those other 2K texts. Then set it for 46K to delete another 2K. That would be better than the above batch mode method, but then you'll also delete any texts from any thread that goes over that threshold. Not unless you can set auto-delete limits for each individual thread. This idea may not even work and only apply to new messages after the change but depends on the app.

 

[Niotic]

I've let the app run for over an hour when it was being charged before. I came back and the box that said DELETING was still up on the screen. Don't know if I should try it over night or what...I also attempted to change the maximum number of texts in a thread. The highest it would let me go was 5000 I think. After doing this, nothing was changed. So I believe Mooncatt was right when he said that that feature might only apply to threads after the change is made.

Any other thoughts?

 

[TechNut79]

Well yea dude, I'm not an *****. I know how to delete a message thread. When I go to delete the thread the screen just comes up the with DELETING window and I wait, and wait and wait some more until the phone freezes or the application crashes. If you read my post this was all in there....? I have also cleared the data and cache but this still does nothing.

Being an *** towards someone who is trying to be helpful is not necessary. Just saying.

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[SuzanoSho]

Being an *** towards someone who is trying to be helpful is not necessary. Just saying.

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Neither is attempting to offer help when you clearly have not read the original post. Just saying.

I'd also like to know if there is a way to do this, as I have a thread with 12000+ texts in it that I would like to delete, as my phone seems to be having sms/mms issues atm...

 

[anon(5600632)]

I would try letting it run overnight - it really could take that long. Then, there's the dreaded factory reset option, which will delete ALL of your text messages and call history.

 

[moonbeamtoo]

I just had this exact same problem myself. I use Handcent SMS and had a large thread that I was moving from the Private Box back to the Inbox. That kept hanging, so I'd end up rebooting and starting over, which ultimately led to that thread more than doubling in size. Like you, I found myself with at 46K + thread that I needed out of there because it was pretty well rendering Handcent, or any other messaging app, almost unusable.

What ended up working was to back everything up using SMS Backup and Restore, then using that same app to delete all my messages. You have to set it as your default messaging app to do so, and you don't get to pick and choose what gets deleted. It wipes *everything*, which is why you want to back things up first, of course. It was worth it though because after letting it run overnight, it's fixed.