How to delete all mail from your iPhone (+ Gmail)

Having too many emails in your inbox can be overwhelming. Work-related mail, personal messages, and those annoying promotions all make up for one vast and messy archive of your communication with the world. Naturally, you’ll want to get it in order from time to time. And the best way of organizing your iPhone’s mailbox is deleting unnecessary emails.

You may also get radical and delete all emails from the Mail app altogether. There is something liberating in looking at an empty list of emails on your phone. At least it won’t be messy anymore. So, if you’ve decided on that measure, we’re going to show you how in this article. Just make sure you set aside some important emails because you probably don’t want to delete just everything from your mailbox.

How to delete all mail from the Mail app on iPhone

1. Open the Mail app.
2. Go to Inbox > Edit.
3. Choose Select All and tap Bin.

Now that you’ve moved all your unwanted emails to Bin, it’s time to permanently delete them from your iPhone. However, the Bin section of the Mail app isn’t visible right away for most users. So, we’ll have to access it first, and then take further action from there. Here’s how to show the Bin folder in iPhone’s Mail app:

1. Open the Mail app.
2. Get to the Mailboxes screen and tap Edit.
3. If Bin isn’t available in the list of mailboxes, tap Add Mailbox…
4. Select Bin and tap Done.

The Bin folder will now be available in the list of mailboxes, and you can easily access it to either permanently delete emails or restore them. If you want to delete emails from Bin forever, follow these steps:

1. Open the Mail app.
2. Get to the Mailboxes screen and open Bin.
3. Tap Edit and select emails you want to delete.
4. Tap Delete.

Now the emails you selected are permanently deleted. Be careful tho, because once you delete them from Bin, there’s now to bring them back. So, make sure you don’t delete something you don’t want to.

How to restore deleted emails in the Mail app

You now know how to delete emails from the Mail app on your iPhone. But in case you changed your mind, it’s not too late to bring emails you accidentally deleted back. Given these emails are still in Bin, you didn’t delete them permanently as I mentioned before. Here’s how to restore emails from the Bin folder:

1. Open the Mail app.
2. Get to the Mailboxes screen and open Bin.
3. Tap Edit and select emails you want to restore.
4. Tap Move and select Inbox.

How to delete mail from Gmail on iPhone

Even though Apple’s Mail app is the default email client on the iPhone, a lot of people still prefer Gmail. And for a good reason, if you ask me, the Gmail app is better designed and offers more features than Apple’s option. Plus it only comes naturally to use Gmail, if you’re at least partially inside Google’s ecosystem.

But Gmail lacks one important option that the Mail app has. And that’s the ability to delete all emails at once. That doesn’t mean you can’t completely empty your Gmail inbox, but the whole process is less convenient and more time-consuming than with Apple’s Mail.

Delete one by one

The only way to delete emails inside the Gmail app is to remove them one by one. That may not be the problem if you want to delete just a few emails, but if you need more than that, using the app probably isn’t the best option. Unless you have time and patience to hand-select hundreds of emails, which I sincerely doubt.

Here’s how to delete emails in the Gmail app on your iPhone:

1. Open the Gmail app and make sure you’re in Inbox.
2. Tap and hold one email from the list.
3. Now, the selection process will initiate. Select all other emails you want to delete by tapping on each.
4. Tap the trash can icon to delete the selected emails.

Delete all emails on your computer

As much as I’d like to be unique from other articles that explain the same thing I’m explaining here, and tell you about some secret way of deleting all your emails from the Gmail app, I can’t. Because there’s no way of doing that. If you want to delete Gmail emails in bulk, you’ll have to access Gmail’s web-based client on your computer.

And even then, you can’t empty your Inbox in one go, because you’re only allowed to delete 50 emails at a time. But that’s still better than having to individually select each email. So, with all these limitations in mind, here’s how to bulk delete Gmail emails on your PC or Mac:

1. Go to Gmail’s web-based client.
2. Sign in to your Google Account, if you already aren’t.
3. Make sure you’re in your Inbox.
4. Click the checkbox icon in the upper-left corner (below the search bar). This will select all the emails on the current page. Since Gmail displays 50 emails per page max, it will select up to 50 emails.
5. Tap the trashcan icon and every selected email will be deleted (moved to Trash).
6. Repeat the process as many times as you need.

Once you complete this unnecessarily long task, all your emails will be transferred to Trash. This means they’re still not lost forever, as you can restore them from Trash. Or you can delete them permanently to make sure they’re gone for good.

The good news is that, unlike moving unwanted emails to Trash, emptying the Trash folder can be done with a single tap. And you don’t need to be on your computer, as this option is available in the app. If you want to empty Gmail’s trash, open the Gmail app, open the hamburger menu and go to Trash, tap Empty Trash. This will permanently delete all emails inside the Trash folder.

If you don’t want to get rid of everything, but just a few emails, there’s also a way. While in Trash, tap and hold the email you want to delete, tap the three-dots menu in the upper-right corner, and choose Delete Forever.

The process is similar if you want to retrieve emails from the Trash folder. Just tap and hold the email you want to restore, tap the three-dots menu in the upper-right corner, and choose Move. Select Inbox, and you’ll bring the deleted email(s) back to your Inbox.

That’s about it. You now know everything you need to manage, delete and restore emails on your iPhone. Whether you’re using the Mail app or Gmail. If you have any comments, questions, or maybe know of some more efficient way of getting rid of mail from your iPhone, feel free to let us know in the comments below.