Hi. I have over 1500 emails in an earthlink.net email account on an iPhone running iOS 8.1 and want to mass-delete all but the last 3 months — say 120 emails. Is there a way to do this other than one-by-one manually?
iPhone 4, iOS 8.1
Not on your phone. Use your computer to delete them from your account on earthlink's webmail site.
But I need to keep them on my computer. Or, are you saying that, once they've been downloaded to the Powerbook G4 and iPhone 4, if I delete them on webmail, they'll disappear from my iPhone?
I think my experience has been that, if I delete my road runner webmail emails, it has no effect on e mail already downloaded to my MPB or iPhone 5s.
I read a nifty-sounding 'trick' for deleting piles of email on an iPhone, but the tipper said not to try it on massive amounts or it would freeze up the iPhone. You check the top email (which activates the 'Move' button so it becomes clickable). Then holding the Move button, unclick the top email and wait, holding down 'Move' (while, seemingly, nothing's happening). Once all the email has been moved, you are presented with a screen with the option to move the moved mail to trash. I'll attach a screenshot of that screen, showing what happened just now to all the (16) emails presently on this iPhone 5s...
Whether or not they are deleted from your Mac when you delete them from your webmail depends on the type of account you have. If it's a POP/POP3 account, they will remain on your Mac. If it's an IMAP or Exchange account, they will be deleted from your Mac too.
Thanks, R. Yes, the earthlink.net account must be POP3. And rr is too. Does a Reset "Erase All Content and Settings" delete email? How would one then move the last 120 emails back onto the iPhone from the server—except by forwardng them to oneself?
That will erase everything on your phone. I don't think you want to do that. Just go to the webmail site and erase the email there.
Nevermind. If it's a POP3 account you're going to have to delete it on your phone to remove them. If you delete everything by erasing your phone, when you sign back into the account all the email is just going to download back to your phone again. I'm afraid your going to have to delete them manually from the mail app.
I would try deleting a few dozen, then refresh your email to see if the download again before going through the trouble of deleting them all. Some POP accounts will keep downloading any email on the server if it isn't on your device.
How to delete massive amounts of email on iPhone
