IpadOS 27.x, deleting Junk folder contents, should be easier, right?

The deletion process is 2 steps by design. You have no idea how many people come to these forums trying to recover something they deleted and want back even with a 2 step process and a time frame between the first deletion and the final unrecoverable one. If Apple returned to the one-step option, there'd be literlaly hundreds of thousands of complaints about it because people simply aren't ever sure they ever want to delete something permanently.

With that said, once in the Trash emails will be eliminated on their own after a set period of time you may be able control. There is no reason to go into trash a manually delete them. Once in trash you can simply leave them and they will be removed eventually.

You can control how long this time frame is in Settings ➜ Apps ➜ Mail ➜ Mail Accounts for each account if the Mail provider supports the feature. iCloud for instance offers the options to remove After one month, on week or one day under Mailbox Behaviors. Other Mail providers may have other options or none at all. Outlook.com for instance, will still hold on to the mails for an extra 30 days after they have been deleted from the Deleted items folder, so that is 60 days worth of waiting before the emails are actually gone and cannot be recovered and it offers no option to reduce this time frame. Other providers may have an option in their Advanced Settings to reduce the time emails stay in the deleted folder.

click here ➜ Delete and recover emails in Mail on iPad - Apple Support

and here ➜ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5823793/deletion-of-emails-from-outlook-hotmail-online

Attempting to "unsubscribe" from spam email merely confirms to its source that it is reaching a live (i.e. monitored) email account - inviting more unwanted mail.

Even when unsubscribing from a legitimate business, it is their choice (and their choice alone) to honour the unsubscribe request.

As for the two-step deletion process, files or email messages are intentionally moved first to a Recently Deleted folder - from where a deleted file/message can be recovered for a limited period. Files and messages will typically be automatically purged after 30-days - at which time deletion is permanent.

If you've got a Mac then why don't you just delete them there? You can select all, hit opt-cmd-backspace and they're gone for good.

As Phil says - why sweat it. Set your IMAP settings to delete Trash daily/weekly/monthly and you can forget it.

Spam filtering is best done at the server level, not the client. No point blocking, no point unsubscribing. I get ~half a dozen a day and they go straight to Spam from where I deal with them at the weekend. Every so often a new source sets up and I get a few more while the anti-spam learns, but my ISP's junk filtering and marking is OK. If your mail provider is letting a lot of Spam through the do your homework and get a better one.

Venuslaker wrote:

Maybe a switch can be created so those of us that want the option of deleting straight from the Junk Folder can have it?

The most appropriate channel through which to communicate your Feature Request is the Apple Product Feedback portal. For iPad and iPadOS, this can be accessed here:

Feedback - iPad - Apple

Oh I get over 100 messages a day that end up in the Junk folder. I love my iPad and find myself using it more than my MacBook Pro or iMac.

Granted this all begs the question that there should be a way to stop all the spam and junk messages (at their source). That would be nice. (I tried to unsubscribe from a vendor email and my volume of spam quadrupled!!

Yeah, I get it but, on macOS, they DO have an easier way to delete junk. Yeah, I'm being somewhat pedantic, but I'm not inlove with the ipadOS UI, and just wish it was 'better'.

I'll tweak what I can.

IT SURE DOES!!!

Better to not make a sound, or even give your address out to *anyone*! With all the exfiltrated email addresses around, I'm sure I'm getting emails from any number of server hacks by all the likely suspects. BTW go to haveIbeenpwnd dot com and see if your address(es) have been siphoned and from where. Eye opening it is...

Lazy? Ex-programmer... I'm just carping about the many little idiosyncrasies between macOS and ipadOS. Part of it is trying to get my wife to make the jump rather than lugging around her MBP across the country. She's right, it isn't the same and the things that aren't are kind of annoying. To me...

I had over 143 messages. In one day. So tired of it all. Thanks for responding.

Oh, I do have a 'server', kinda. I have an iMac Pro, and use it to *hopefully* process the junk so I don't have to. It also files appropriate messages too. Works rather well, as long as it's up. Obviously each mac filters too, and iCloud does have some filters, but I have hundreds of filters for all the junk I've gotten over the years.

But at the volume I get, that's not very helpful. I had hoped that A/UX would stick around longer and provide a way to leverage the email server to do more muscular filtering for the family, but it went in the trash. They probably had a reason to dump it finally, but I at least wanted to play with it and see what it could do to help me.

I used to toss all message from certain domains immediately (and on Mail, they ARE gone), until a new vendor said they actually used an AOL address. Yikes. We also had a vendor that was used gmail. (It was a national company too) It just struck me that I'm on the other end of that domain mess. Using me.com, I've had a one or two vendors who are filtering that out too. Moving to a different email domain is the fix, but opens a whole hot mess of yuck. Glad I'm retired.

Oh, my hangup on not going through the Trash folder is that I thought that in Junk, links and weapons were defused. Just concerned that some carefully crafted 'spam bomb' might go off in the Trash folder.Just because your paranoid...

Spam/junk are part of the game if you want to be on the internet, but knowing that, it should be easier to flush that folder. There are also a few other folder ops that are missing, but anyway...

Thanks all. Appreciate all the responses.

real gonzoid wrote:

But at the volume I get, that's not very helpful.

I'm pretty cavalier with my email address. I've had it for decades and pretty much use the same one for everything. I just checked my spam folder. It has 126 messages in it. I never empty it manually so that represents about 30 days of spam. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine how one would get hundreds a day.

But even at a hundred a day, what's the harm in just letting them auto-delete after 30 days? If you're using IMAP, as I understand it, only the headers are downloaded until you tap on the email to open it. That means the spam isn't taking up much space.

Best of luck.

I had a bunch of 'burner addresses' when I was more involved in my and other businesses. I even used 'Hide My Email' from iCloud, but Apple had to ruin it.

Yeah, the volume comes and goes. It's back up again so that must mean that some server that had mine in it was hacked. Oh joy... It's not like it was. At one point I was getting over 500 a day. I seriously had no idea where they were coming from, meaning who signed me up EXCEPT for the unsubscribe jaunt I did occasionally. One got me a huge spike in junk. Yeah, Just Don't Do It! Unsubscribing is a bad thing to do. It seems to make sense, but yeah, you won't like the attention.

So I'm kinda done with this issue. I'm apparently doing what I can, and I'll have to keep my MBP around to deal better with Mail, and my wife might as well use her iPad here and continue lugging around her MBP too. (Maybe I can get an upgrade and inherit her iPad)

But even at a hundred a day, what's the harm in just letting them auto-delete after 30 days?

The volume. 143 messages was too much. That's what drove me to try flushing the iPad's Junk folder. *sigh*

🖖🏼

real gonzoid wrote:

But even at a hundred a day, what's the harm in just letting them auto-delete after 30 days?

The volume. 143 messages was too much. That's what drove me to try flushing the iPad's Junk folder. *sigh*

I still don't understand why you can't simply ignore the Junk folder. It will empty itself as things age out. It requires no management on your part. But you do you.

Best of luck.

I believe that if you're using iCloud Mail, the Junk folder auto-deletes after 30 days.

Maybe a switch can be created so those of us that want the option of deleting straight from the Junk Folder can have it?