(Partial) permanent deletion of e-mails in Trash

[Mikeo1938]

I have an iPad that I hardly ever use for e-mail but early this morning I was sleepily fiddling with it and thought to myself, "I might as well trash all these e-mails because I never look at them on the iPad."

Bad move!

When I went to my MPB, where I use 'Mail', the Inbox was empty and the Trash was bursting at the seams.

In the Trash of the Gmail account in question, there are some 800 e-mails.

I don't want to permanently delete all of them – some I will move back into the Inbox or into folders "On my Mac".

How can I do a partial permanent delete of the unwanted e-mails that are in Trash?

Edit - (Oh dear. Just seen an old post from 2008 that indicates that the above cannot be done. Or have things changed since then?)
Partial emptying of trash ?

M

 

[IWT]

Hi M.

I presume your email account is IMAP.

On that basis, anything you do on one device is transmitted to all Devices using that account. This explains Trashing the emails on the iPad being reflected in a Trash folder on your Mac.

You can manually move emails from Trash to the Inbox or any other Mailbox of your choosing - huge job with 800 of the blighters.

What's left in Trash can then be deleted. On my iMac running macOS Mojave, I can delete individual emails by highlighting the email, then delete; but maybe you can't if there is something specific about Gmail that won't allow this??

Best I can suggest at the moment.

Ian

 

[Mikeo1938]

Thanks Ian ... in fact it was even worse than I said. There were 8000 of them. I made a half-hearted attempt to check whether the important ones had indeed been moved to my sub-folders but this was a never-ending task. This morning I just closed my eyes and deleted the lot. Whoosh ...
M

 

[IWT]

And I'll wager you won't miss them

We all think that this and that email could be important some day; oh, and that attachment. We all keep them far too long. Bravo, I say. I wish I had your courage

Ian

 

[Mikeo1938]

OK Ian ... I hope that we are both right!
Regards ...
M