How does one delete very old gmail pages en bloc?

[Mike Reed]

I have gmail traffic going back to 2005, and whereas I've done an individual deletion purge from time to time, there's a lot of stuff that should go.

I want to simply return to the beginning quickly (not month by month/page by page) and delete whole pages for 10 or more years. I've noticed recently that the email logo on the Google page is getting slow to load up and wonder if this can be the cause. My wife, who's much more computer literate than me, can't see a way to do this. Maybe it's impossible; no idea.

Windows 10 here.

 

[Bob McC]

Open gmail in a lap top or desk top.
Top right click reverse order
Top left click whole page box.
Delete.
Repeat.

 

[KrisW]

The volume of email you have should not affect how long it takes to log in to the gmail.com website.

 

[garyi]

Your best bet may be to put the credentials in outlook let it all down load and delete from there?

 

[Mike Reed]

Top right click reverse order
Top left click whole page box.
Delete.
Repeat.

Sorry Bob, but yes, I can and do, occasionally, go mack page by page; even a year or more, but what I want is to go back to the beginning without having to go page by page. Didn't know about the whole page delete box, though, which at least is useful once I return to 2005. Thanks.

The volume of email you have should not affect how long it takes to log in to the gmail.com website.

I did wonder, esp. as my content was a fairly low percentage last year when I looked, but all those forgotten photos.... surely must fill up the allocation?

Your best bet may be to put the credentials in outlook let it all down load and delete from there?

Thanks but sorry, don't understand that (credentials?). Currently Google Chrome so don't follow your procedure.

 

[garyi]

Gmail is just email. Put you user name and password into Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail on your computer. The emails will be downloaded to your computer. you can now select all of them a delete at once. And also you have your email in your email client always nicer than trapsing through a browser.

 

[gintonic]

can't you just move all the ones you want to keep to another mailbox, then select all the rest and delete, and move all the keepers back to your inbox?

I never use Gmail through the website, only through a mail client (Outlook) so YMMV

 

[imarks]

I have gmail traffic going back to 2005, and whereas I've done an individual deletion purge from time to time, there's a lot of stuff that should go.

I want to simply return to the beginning quickly (not month by month/page by page) and delete whole pages for 10 or more years. I've noticed recently that the email logo on the Google page is getting slow to load up and wonder if this can be the cause. My wife, who's much more computer literate than me, can't see a way to do this. Maybe it's impossible; no idea.

Windows 10 here.

Use with caution!

Example to delete all emails in inbox date 2014 or older:

• Open Gmail in Chrome browser (probably works in other browsers)
• In search box enter: label:inbox Before:2015/01/01
• This will give you a paginated view of all the emails in your inbox that are older than 1st Jan 2015.
• Just above the top email on the left is a check box, click it to select all emails (At this point it will only have selected all the emails on the current page).
• You should see a slightly grey area has appeared above the selected emails saying something like "50 conversations on this page are selected" there should also be a link which says something like "Select all conversations that match this search". Clicking on this link will select ALL the emails.
• You can then delete them all by clicking on the delete icon.

 

[Vinny]

Put you user name and password into Microsoft Outlook

This does NOT work, except to make mails invisible.
Deleting anything in Outlook, does NOT remove the mail from your computer - it just removes all flags from it, so it has no home outside of the folder on your computer - not in Inbox, Sent Items, not even in Deleted/Trash, only in the folder on your hard drive. Deleting them from the folder does not work either - they reload from the cloud when you next start Outlook.
I hate using gmail online - I FAR, far prefer Outlook, but I eventually discovered why my laptop was running slow - gazillions of ancient and "deleted" emails in the Outlook folders.

 

[garyi]

Thats not the behaviour here, anything I do in outlook is totally reflected in gmail online and vise versa

 

[Vinny]

Thats not the behaviour here, anything I do in outlook is totally reflected in gmail online and vise versa

Deletion online is probably real deletion. Pick something to delete in Outlook and then check the pst files - it is still there but not attached to any Outlook folder.

I have raised it here and people FAR better qualified than me agreed (or actually told me) - you CANNOT ACTUALLY delete anything from Outlook.

I found mails going back for as long as I have owned a gmail account. I have only ever used online email for the past 6-12 months, after I found all of this out and spending HOURS upon HOURS deleting unlabelled emails from my laptop folders, which once deleted, went into the Deleted Items folder of Outlook.

 

[garyi]

Oh right, well I dont know what to say about that I have used outlook for 20 years and beyond the usual windows crap has never been an issue. All I know is if I delete gmail emails from outlook then look on line they are gone from there too, if I empty the trash in outlook, online in gmail the trash is emptied too. Good enough for me.

 

[Vinny]

Oh right, well I dont know what to say about that I have used outlook for 20 years and beyond the usual windows crap has never been an issue. All I know is if I delete gmail emails from outlook then look on line they are gone from there too, if I empty the trash in outlook, online in gmail the trash is emptied too. Good enough for me.

All abslutely true here too.

But deletions in Outlook are not realy deleted, they are just homeless, invisible to Outlook.

 

[garyi]

ok. so what I said still stands in relation to the OPs question.

 

[Mark Grant]

Deletion online is probably real deletion. Pick something to delete in Outlook and then check the pst files - it is still there but not attached to any Outlook folder.

I have raised it here and people FAR better qualified than me agreed (or actually told me) - you CANNOT ACTUALLY delete anything from Outlook.
.

If you pst files then you have probably set up outllook gmail as pop email which is why you cant delete from outlook, you need imap to give outlook full access to delete emails, empty trash etc.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...-and-ost-222eaf92-a995-45d9-bde2-f331f60e2790

 

[garyi]

Humm, I have not used pop in a decade. All I could find on line is that outlook appears to retain a number of recent emails you can recover (or purge)

 

[Vinny]

ok. so what I said still stands in relation to the OPs question.

Yes and no - if the problem is volume of the emails, you achieve nothing. Getting them out of your folders, this works, but who cares that they have 2126 pages of mails in any folder?

If you pst files then you have probably set up outllook gmail as pop email which is why you cant delete from outlook, you need imap to give outlook full access to delete emails, empty trash etc.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...-and-ost-222eaf92-a995-45d9-bde2-f331f60e2790

I deleted the accounts in Outlook as even if I deleted the whole folders, they re-downloaded, complete, once Outllook was opened again. All I use Outlook for now is the calendar/reminders.
From memory, I would say that pop disappeared an age ago and they were in Outlook as imap - I am 99.9% certain.

As above - I raised this all here around a year ago and I am repeating what I was told, and had, effectively, found by chance.

I found the mails using the freeware "Treesize", which maps your drives. I downloaded that simply because my laptop ran slow and my hard drive appeared full even with next to nothing saved to it apart from programs. It was FULL of emails, the vast majority of which had been deleted from Deleted Items.

I even used the Microsoft forum and got no help except - delete the mails and they are gone........................ NO, they are not.One comment differentiated between deleting from Trash and Deleted Items - tried that - irrelevant - same problem.

 

[garyi]

Nope, you must have POP, this behaviour simply does not happen for me. If I sign up to gmail (for instance) in outlook right now it will only download whats currently in my imap folders online.

If you are getting a tonne of emails coming in, thats nothing to do with Outlook persay, its the server with stored POP emails, because when you delete a pop email from outlook it wont delete it from the host server, thats not a fault of outlook, thats POP.

 

[Vinny]

Nope, you must have POP, this behaviour simply does not happen for me. If I sign up to gmail (for instance) in outlook right now it will only download whats currently in my imap folders online.

If you are getting a tonne of emails coming in, thats nothing to do with Outlook persay, its the server with stored POP emails, because when you delete a pop email from outlook it wont delete it from the host server, thats not a fault of outlook, thats POP.

Sorry, but you are wrong.
The accounts were imap.
I do not get tonnes of emails either, nothing like - 10-20 per day in all probability. I have recived 10 so far today and would be amazed if 10 more arrive today.
I would GUESS that deleting online is REAL deletion, but Outlook does not delete anything, it just removes flags. I even asked IT-nerds at work and they agreed too. To which my question was - "but work must have gazillions of emails every day - where are they stored?" - they did not know enough to answer but did pont out that commercial and private memory and management of memory etc. are WAY different.

 

[garyi]

I deleted the accounts in Outlook as even if I deleted the whole folders, they re-downloaded, complete, once Outllook was opened again. All I use Outlook for now is the calendar/reminders.

You are confusing me sorry, here you said you deleted but they redownloaded, that's the behaviour of pop. I can see online that outlook keeps some emails not sure for how long in a 'recovery' state that you can purge. I don't really understand what you are trying to articulate. When I delete emails from my outlook, then the server does too and over all the size of my email folder declines.

Where would I find that outlook is getting bigger and bigger from non deleted content (genuinely interested BTW). Presumably there is somewhere in windows where I have a file getting out of hand. I delete like shit tonnes every day.