I went crazy yesterday looking for a tool that would easily let me remove every single e-mail from my Gmail account. I really find it hard to believe that even though I get the “E-mails deleted” message, they are not being kept somewhere for some agency’s convenience. Nonetheless, I wanted to take a measure of removing everything and quickly (I don’t have anything to hide really, it’s just for learning!.)

By quickly I mean that if you have thousands of e-mail conversations, the largest amount of e-mails/threads that you could list within Gmail are 100. Therefore an hour clicking select-all and delete would have been incredibly insane.

I started googling. I found a script in perl that some guy wrote which simply connected to Gmail’s IMAP service and looped through the threads removing everything with IMAP commands.

Then I found a series of threads about people trying to do the same thing, which is automating the e-mail deletion process, and a discussion on how certain Firefox GreaseMonkey (http://www.greasespot.net/) plugins could fake your button clicks, pretty much like a single sign on session.

I also found python libraries from 2005, nothing really convincing.

That is when I went back to the Gmail interface and selected all 100 threads on screen, and all of a sudden this amazing “Select all 4015 conversations in Inbox” link appeared! It had already been implemented by Gmail, stupid me trying to look somewhere else for the response!

Clicking on that link provided me with a way of selecting everything I had in my Inbox, then again on my Sent e-mails and by clicking on the Delete button I moved everything to the Trash. You then have to go to the Trash and delete everything forever.

Hope that saves you some time!