How Can I Quickly Delete All Of The Spam From My Inbox?

Dear Mr. Pogue,

I don’t delete my junk mail on a regular basis, thereby creating an avalanche of it on my iPhone. I was curious to know if you had a solution as to how to delete large amounts of spam—other than using the Edit button and then ticking off ones to be deleted one at a time.

Today, for example, there were 540 pieces of junk mail, and with being allowed to edit only 50 messages at a time, it took considerable doing to get rid of it all. Do you have an alternate solution?

Mary Phillips

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Dear Mary,

There’s no faster way to do it on your phone.

However, most email accounts these days offer a second access point: a Web page. If your account is supplied by Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail/Outlook.com (or another Microsoft service), or your cable company, for example, you can edit your messages online, using your computer. That way you have the benefit of a bigger screen, a mouse and a keyboard, so it’s quick and easy to delete huge swaths of junk mail.

At Gmail.com, for example, you can click the first checkbox to select it and then Shift-click the last one; all the messages in between are automatically selected.

Now hit the Report Spam button to simultaneously delete the spam and report it to Google so that it can block future mailings from these junk-mailing lowlifes.

—DP

David Pogue reads every message readers send him, and answers as many as he can before collapsing in exhaustion. A few, he answers here, in Pogue's Inbox. You can email him here.