How To Delete All Junk Mail in Gmail

Gmail is Google’s powerful and free email client that more and more people rely on for their routine and even mission-critical communication needs. One of the nice things about Gmail is that, being a web-based application, Google can roll out new features and expand the power of the application on an ongoing basis. This means the app tends to just gradually get better and better, as existing features are upgraded and new capabilities added. For example, in the early years of Gmail, it didn’t offer many options when it came to deleting multiple emails. Everything had to be done manually, as there were no provisions for sorting emails or marking emails not shown on the first page of a folder.

Luckily, that is no longer the case and today, cleaning house in Gmail is very easy. You still have to tend to some folders yourself, but a large portion of your inbox is automatically maintained and spruced up by Gmail itself. In this article, I will show you how some powerful techniques for handling large quantities of mail, and specifically, how to delete all your junk mail.

How can I delete all my junk mail?

To access the Spam folder in Gmail, you have to expand the list of categories. Left to itself, Gmail will delete all emails in this folder that are older than 30 days automatically, on a rolling basis. This is good, because depending on how many things you have used your email address to sign up for, you might be receiving dozens, hundreds, or even more spam messages every day. Although Google is really good at telling the difference between real email and spam, but it isn’t perfect – if you do important business in your email address, a monthly check of your spam filter (or even more frequently) might be a good idea.

However, if you’ve checked your spam folder and you want to wipe out everything it contains, that’s very simple. If you want to remove all of them, you can do exactly that. Under the search box, you’ll find a button titled ‘Delete all spam messages now’. Click it and confirm your action by pressing OK.

How can I delete all my junk mail?

Whether it’s your spam folder or your trash folder, Google will let you wipe it all out with the touch of a button. Just as with the spam folder, you can empty your trash with one button press, and the button is in the same spot. Navigate to your trash folder and select “Empty Trash now”.

How do I empty my junk folder in Gmail on iPhone?

It used to be that you couldn’t delete all your email in the junk folder on the iPhone version of Gmail. However, the iPhone version eventually caught up to the mainstream and now the iPhone software is as capable as the Chrome-based browser version of Gmail from a few years ago. The procedure is the same as it is on Chrome – just open the folder and tap the “Empty trash now” button or the “Empty Spam now” button.

How to delete junk mail all at once on Android

Same as iOS – on an Android device, be it tablet, smartphone, or Chromebook, wiping your Spam or Trash folder is a touch-one-button job.

Is there a way to delete more than 50 emails at a time in Gmail?

So the Spam and Trash folders are easy to wipe out…how about your other directories?

At first glance, it looks like you can select all the messages in a directory with the “Select All” command in the selection area of the Gmail web interface.

You click the down arrow next to the box, select “All”, and every message is selected, right, ready for a quick delete? Alas, no – it only selects the first 50 unread messages, and the first 50 read messages, on the screen. The next page of results is totally nonselected.

It’s the same in the app versions of Gmail. Selecting all then hitting the trash button will delete all the emails that are shown on the current page, but not on subsequent pages.

However, you can select more mail than just one page’s worth by using the search box. To select all the messages in your Gmail account, select All in the box, then look to the right. There will be a text reading something like “All 50 conversations on this page are selected.” Then to the right of that will be a button that says something along the lines of “Select all 3,294 conversations in Whatever This Folder Is Named”. Click that and everything is truly selected – then your delete can proceed in earnest!

(Are you just trying to clear things out so that you can see your unread emails? We’ve got a walkthrough on how to easily display just your unread emails in Gmail.)

Another Way to Remove the Clutter

So you can get rid of a million messages at once…what if you’d like to prevent things from building up to that point in the first place? Gmail has a powerful filter function that will let you set up rules to delete incoming emails based on specific keywords in the title, whether the message has attachments, and many other criteria.

1. Log into your Gmail account
2. Click on the settings button
3. Select the Filters tab
4. Select ‘Create new filter’
5. Make your selection and input the keywords
6. Click ‘Create filter with this search’
7. Select ‘Delete it’
8. Click ‘Create filter’
9. Select ‘Also apply filter to matching messages’

This comes in handy for those who receive a lot of spam or bulk emails.

A Final Thought

It’s no wonder that Gmail is the most popular email service provider. Not only is it free but it also has a wide array of sorting features so that you can organize your inbox in any way you want.

Deleting emails or preventing emails from unwanted senders has never been easier. Although you’re still required to perform some manual selections if you’re not targeting the Spam and Trash folders, you’re still able to delete thousands of emails with one action instead of repeating the selection process on every page.

Google Apps like Gmail are increasingly important in the online world. If you’d like to learn more about how these cloud-based apps function, check out “Google Apps Made Easy: Learn to Work in the Cloud.”