Have you ever received a slew of messages on your BlackBerry, none of which you want or need? One of my BIS accounts receives a moderate amount of spam, all of which is flagged by SpamAssassin with [SPAM] in the subject line. I've tried setting filters at BIS, but they never seem to work. Fortunately there's an easy way to quickly delete all of the offending messages at once.
Step 1 – Searching
From the Mail window open the menu and choose Search. Enter parameters that will find all of the messages you want to delete, and only the messages you want to delete. In my case it's anything with [SPAM] in the subject.
Step 2 – Search Results
Review the search results and make sure they don't contain any messages you do not want to delete. If the results do contain messages you don't want to delete you will need to refine the search parameters to exclude them.
Step 3 – Delete Prior
This is where the magic happens. Select a date heading, open the menu and choose Delete Prior. If a message is highlighted and not a date heading you will not have a Delete Prior option.
In the context of search results, Delete Prior will only delete messages that were found by the search, not everything prior to the date of the first result.
Wait, what about BES users?
No guts, no glory. Go ahead and try it.
If you're more timid, Delete Prior only removes messages from the handheld, not the desktop. I've never tested this with any of the bi-directional sync BIS email options like GMail or Yahoo, so if you're using one of those services you should test first.
Confirm that you want to delete the messages and after a moment you'll see that all of the messages have been deleted and you're free of spam, printer notices or emails from Wiskus. Let's see your iPhone do this!
Tags: BlackBerry, Copy Paste, iPhone, Spam, Things you can't do with an iPhone, Tips
September 11th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
You certainly know your stuff so I have a question for you. I just replaced my pearl with a new one. On my old when I deleted prior messages it did not clear my call log and that's the way I like it. On my new one, when I delete prior messages, it clears the call log. How do I unlink the call log from the messages when I delete prior?
October 2nd, 2009 at 3:23 am
Hey,
Just wanted to thank you so much for this post! I was getting so fed up with deleting messages one by one!
xxx
October 21st, 2009 at 3:22 pm
LIFESAVER! Thanks soooo much! An accidental thingy with my watchamagiggy left me with hundreds of emails all pulling in today — BOOOM! You solved it! Big props — thanks for the post ~
~GirlPie
March 9th, 2010 at 11:37 am
I cannot thank you enough for this post. I have asked many people, including phone company employees for this feature, and until I discovered your post, nobody was able to help. Many, many thanks.
-Adam
April 8th, 2010 at 8:40 am
This is great! Hey how did you get the screenshots?