How do I delete ALL my Gmail from the Phone?

[Harvey Wallbanger]

I am using the GMail app and have accumulated many months worth of messages. Now I just want to get rid of them all to free up some memory on my phone. I really don't want to have to check and delete each message individually. Isn't there some way to batch delete all my mail? What if I just uninstalled the GMail app, would that do it?

 

[DeeMat]

Are you trying to delete them just from your phone?

 

[Harvey Wallbanger]

Yes just from the phone. Is there a way to use astro file manager to get at them and delete them?

 

[prometheus]

Batch deletion appears to not be possible at this point, I guess in this regard Droid doesn't.

However, I think there's a way to clear out a lot of old messages from the phone. Try this:

open the gmail app / menu / settings / labels / number of days to sync / lower that to 1 day / -- back out of gmail and go to home screen / menu / settings / accounts & sync / select the account you want to sync

This should resync with only 1 day's worth of messages, thus purging all messages older than 1 day and effectively deleting them from your phone while retaining them in your gmail account.

I'm just guessing about this and trying to play around with it. Tell me if it works.

 

[Harvey Wallbanger]

Batch deletion appears to not be possible at this point, I guess in this regard Droid doesn't.

However, I think there's a way to clear out a lot of old messages from the phone. Try this:

open the gmail app / menu / settings / labels / number of days to sync / lower that to 1 day / -- back out of gmail and go to home screen / menu / settings / accounts & sync / select the account you want to sync

This should resync with only 1 day's worth of messages, thus purging all messages older than 1 day and effectively deleting them from your phone while retaining them in your gmail account.

I'm just guessing about this and trying to play around with it. Tell me if it works.

Nope that doesn't work. I still have many months of old gmail stored on my phone.

There must be a file or folder somewhere on the phone that's holding all those old e-mails. If I knew where it was, perhaps I could delete it with Astro File Manager?

 

[Harvey Wallbanger]

It just occured to me - if I have 23000+ old Gmail messages, are they really all stored on the Droid, or is the Droid GMail App just pulling them in off the net as I scroll back in time to read old messages? If they aren't really being stored on the Droid and taking up my RAM then I really don't need to worry about how many old e-mails I have.

 

[prometheus]

they're probably NOT on the phone. You know how it says "loading mesages" and then thinks for a minute? well, it's probably retrieving them from gmail at that time.

23,000 messages? what's your available memory on device? that would answer your question right there.

 

[DeeMat]

That's a lot of emails!

 

[entwined82]

No matter what its going to sync to your inbox. You need to delete some stuff.

 

[Jerry Hildenbrand]

Archive old messages, then they won't appear on the phone, are still available through search and aren't deleted on the web.

Do it from your computer where you CAN batch files

 

[mrmoe110]

Archive old messages, then they won't appear on the phone, are still available through search and aren't deleted on the web.

Do it from your computer where you CAN batch files

+1 yup. if you use different labels for your emails it works perfect. hit "view labels" and all the relevant email shows up.

 

[Harvey Wallbanger]

That worked although at 100 messages per page times two keypresses to select all and archive it took me 460 clicks to archive 23000 messages! But yes once I'd done that from my pc at the next sync the messages were gone from my Droid too. Thanks!

 

[WAM]

pretty sure google is storing it for you...

 

[Jerry Hildenbrand]

That worked although at 100 messages per page times two keypresses to select all and archive it took me 460 clicks to archive 23000 messages! But yes once I'd done that from my pc at the next sync the messages were gone from my Droid too. Thanks!

You're welcome.

And you bring up a great point - Google needs to have better batch controls on our handsets. It's little things that are needed to keep up in this business, and i hope Google listens and tries to implement them. A menu item for select all -> archive can't be that hard to code.

 

[WarER4X]

That worked although at 100 messages per page times two keypresses to select all and archive it took me 460 clicks to archive 23000 messages! But yes once I'd done that from my pc at the next sync the messages were gone from my Droid too. Thanks!

I could see how you might miss this, but when on gmail through your PC web browser, when you hit "select all", a link appears as the top (over your email list) that will say something like "select all X messages?" (X being the total number of messages in your inbox, even the ones not showing on that page). That allows you to select everything without going through a page at a time. Google added that feature a couple years ago, I think.

-SR-

 

[Harvey Wallbanger]

I could see how you might miss this, but when on gmail through your PC web browser, when you hit "select all", a link appears as the top (over your email list) that will say something like "select all X messages?" (X being the total number of messages in your inbox, even the ones not showing on that page). That allows you to select everything without going through a page at a time. Google added that feature a couple years ago, I think.

-SR-

NOW he tells me! LOL! Thanks for the tip!

 

[bashley#AC]

Doesn't work unless you have an imap account. My gmail account was set up as pop years ago. I periodically delete ALL my mail at the gmail site (If the NSA wants it they can go fish!) but that doesn't affect what I've downloaded to my tablet. What I finally did was delete all the mail at the gmail site and then delete and re-install that gmail account on my tablet. What I'd like is to download all my mail to my desktop AND download it to my tablet when the tablet is on (rarely) and then be able to delete it from the tablet at will. Unfortunately, gmail won't allow you to download email more than once unless you cancel POP and then restart it, in which case you will download everything at the site that you haven't deleted. NOT WHAT I WANT TO DO. I do not want my email sitting out on the googlecloud if I can help it; I can't control how many backups they make or what they do with them, but I don't want to help them do it.

Surely it should NOT be this difficult to get rid of garbage. It's not even a straightforward "DELETE ALL" button at the website, which is what it should be. .

 

[lindathunder]

I found that if you hold down each message for a bit it lights up blue and stays blue and then do the next and the next and voila DELETE THEM ALL!!

 

[wnrussell3]

Android 4.3+ got rid of the Select All choice. Painless way is to open Gmail on PC, select all and delete. Takes 2 seconds.

 

[igep]

Hi:

My problem is this. I have managed to delete all but 184 messages from my gmail account on my computer. But I still have 3900 on my gmail droid account. No matter what I do I can not get rid of them. :-!I even tried to delete the account and it threatened to destroy all of my data and go back to factory reset. Any suggestions?