Hi Gavin,
A warm welcome to the forums.
Personally mass delete by date is not an approach I would take. One imagines that there is good reason for you having kept your emails? I would suggest a more structured approach, such as delete items by
Which email client do you use?
All IMAP email clients facilitate searching by
- Size
- Sender
- Subject
- Date
- Ascending / Descending
Remember that all folders count to your utilisation, including sent items.
I tend to sort by each of the above in the order given...
- size first and get rid of the emails which people have used to ship documents / photos which would have been better shared using a file sharing service, such as OneDrive, Dropbox or iCould - this delivers the quickest rewards as often the attachments can be several MB
- sender second gets rid of a lot of noise / reminder emails which only had relevance at the time...
- Amazon (and others') delivery notices
- Facebook (and other social media notifications)
- Calendar reminders
- Mailing lists you have subscribed to - this can act as a useful prompt to unsubscribe from them entirely
- ... the list goes on
- subject third is a tidy way of getting rid of related messages regardless of size, sender or date
- date last (sort ascending) allows the decision to be made on age
Deleting can have performance considerations, in that a delete is not usually a delete, but a move to the deleted items folder. You might consider doing this using webmail if the numbers are substantial, but webmail has been known to have some performance concerns when the sort sequence is not the default. The following might also be helpful.
Culling mailbox contents
If you need to clean out your mailbox, may be because it is over quota, then as well as tidying up the inbox, you need to also look at the SENT ITEMS folder and then afterwards clear out the TRASH folder. However some times webmail performance can make this process very tedious, particularly if the delete action (actually a move to the trash folder) fails.
If you primarily want to delete emails, you can mitigate delete performance issues by doing an "immediate" delete (rather than a move to trash for deletion later) by holding down the SHIFT key when pressing the DEL key. This works in both webmail and most PC based email clients. WARNING SHIFT+DEL is not recoverable so be certain absolutely, that you do not need the email before pressing the buttons!
Alternatively, in webmail (Round Cube) Settings -> Server Settings there are some options worth exploring controlling how deletes are performed...
- Flag the message for deletion instead of delete
- If moving messages to "Deleted Items" fails, permanently delete them
- Compact Inbox on logout
Setting these options and using them together will avoid the over heads of moving items to the trash folder when you wish to delete them. They will simply be greyed out and remain in the inbox list. After logging out of webmail, they will then be removed from the mailbox.
Whilst this might be highly proficient, it needs to be used with care, for when they are gone, they are gone. Note also that Plusnet house-keeping clears out the trash folder weekly.
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