Why can't we select all email messages for "move" or "delete" on iPhone 4S?

I was surprised to read this -- so surprised, that I checked my phone to make sure there really was no way to select multiple emails. You're right, there is no way.

The fact that I've been using an iPhone (or iPod Touch) for so many years and never noticed it? Well, that suggests I never needed it.

You have a few options. First, use a different email client on your iPhone. I would have unreservedly recommended Sparrow until recently; Google just bought them and further development is dead. Sorry, I don't have other suggestions, but there are other clients.

Second, change the way you work with email. I'm a heavy email user, but I've set up server-side filtering to handle the heavy lifting. That is, only the most important stuff gets sent to my inbox. The rest is stuffed into folders where I can deal with it on a more powerful (and more time-efficient) platform in my office. This takes effort to set up, but it saves a lot of work.

Third, use a different phone. iPhones are not the only mobile computer, and perhaps a more-customizable (Android) phone will give you what you want.

preludio wrote:

I was surprised to read this -- so surprised, that I checked my phone to make sure there really was no way to select multiple emails. You're right, there is no way.

You can select multiple emails by tapping the Edit button in the upper right corner and then selecting the emails you want by tapping in the circles at the left. What you can't do is select all emails.

You can submit feedback here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/

Gotcha. I feel your pain. I changed email providers because of a similar problem. In my view, any company that doesn't provide aggressive spam filtering is a company that doesn't respect my time or my safety, and thus don't deserve my business. Of course, I'm in the nice position of being able to control this for both personal and professional email use.

As for Apple not addressing the "simple and obvious" problem, well, let me suggest that while it might be obvious, it isn't a serious problem for a lot of people. If it were, there would be lots of discussion about it. I've read a lot about Apple's design processes, and I doubt they overlooked this feature. They chose not to include it. Given the absurdly large amount of money they've made selling iPhones, it's pretty difficult to argue they've made the wrong decision.

None of that helps when your individual needs come against their decisions, of course! And with Apple, that edge can be brutally hard.

To address the "simple" part of your plea: yes, it is a simple request. But it may not be simple to execute. Coding-wise, I have no idea if this is simple, nor what compromises would have to be made in order to make this happen reliably.

I definitely second kb1951's suggestion to submit feedback.

I believe that adding a "delete all" function to the iPhone would cause problems for some people accidentally deleteing all their messages. Which would be more of a headache for Apple than not giving the feature.

I can find people asking this same question all the way back to 2009. Obviously, Apple doesn't care what we need. I use my smartphone for business and I have a business need. I do not have the time to manually delete 300 emails a day one at a time, everyday of the year. I will be returning my brand new iPhone 5 and going with a Galaxy 3 because of this one non-function.

Ok. Good luck. Bye bye.

It was possible on an older iPhone OS to select edit>select all. At that point all the radio buttons would be selected then you could click delete. But not nowadays. The fastest way to clear junk mail is scroll to the bottom, open the email and tap the trash can which will pull the message into the trash can and bring up the next message then simply repeat tapping the trash can. Deleting all the junk mail quickly depends on how fast you can click the trash can.