Question

Hi!

I am in need of deleting everything from a gmail account, without deletng the account itself. What I'd love to achieve is that the account is empty, and there are no mails in there. Someone having a password should NOT be able to get messages from the archive, the trash, etc...

There are 3000+ messages, so doing this manually is just plain impossible. I tried to download them using thunderbird and POP3 and delete them from the server, but it has no effect.

Thanks. Palantir

Answer 1

Follow these steps:

• Go to All Mail
• Click Select: All, this will select all mails from the page, but will propose you to select all mails also
• Click Select all xx conversations in All Mails
• Click Delete
• Do the same steps for Sent Mail (and eventually Drafts too, if you have some pending)

• Go to the Trash finally, and do the same steps to remove these messages forever

• You can also go to the spam folder, and click Delete all spam messages now, to clear current spam messages (which will most likely come back, though).

This will remove all mails from received, sent, and spam, and will remove them "forever" (at least from the gmail interface, Google keeps them for a while, but that's another topic).

Answer 2

Follow these steps

• do a search for in:inbox
• click on "Select: All"
• click on "All xx conversations selected. Select all that match this search" at the top of the list
• click on "Delete"
• you can also empty the Trash

This will remove the only existing copy of those emails, you will not be able to recover them if you change your mind later.

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