Deleting Gmail messages (really deleting them)

gtbuzz

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May 27, 2011
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I just had to figure out how to do this again and it was confusing, so I figured I'd post it to help people out.

A while back on my Focus I noticed that when I would delete emails, they wouldn't show up in the trash on Gmail. I believe this has to do with the general philosophy behind Gmail in that email archival takes precedence over deletion. So, by default, when you delete mail, it gets archived (essentially the inbox label gets taken off and you can find those messages in All Mail instead of Inbox in Gmail) instead of sent to trash. Seems like it's that way on other platforms too, but I think iOS added an option for deletion/archival in iOS5.

That happens to drive me nuts because if I think it's worthy of trash, I never want to see it again. To fix this behavior, on your phone, go to m.google.com and you'll see a list of mobile products. Select the Sync product.

Within Sync, you'll see a list of devices. This page seems a little buggy in that I've never figured out how to delete an old device and identifying devices seems to be a little tricky. If you've only got one Windows Phone, it's pretty easy. If you have multiples or have had multiples, it can get a little confusing (I've had the Dell Venue Pro, Focus and now the L900). They're all listed as Windows Phone. The way you tell them apart is by the "Last sync" date, which is not the date that gmail last synced with that device, but instead when that device was first hooked up to Google services.

Select the device you want to change, and you'll see options for enabling send mail as as well as, delete email as trash. There are also options for syncing additional calendars within there as well, as I don't think it does it by default.

Kind of dumb that the "fix" is so hard to find (and not very well published either), but there it is. I hope that saves someone else from the many hours of frustration I had.
 
THANK YOU!

This was driving me nutty all this time.

I will try these steps tonight.
Thank you, will save me a few hours of searching when I get mine sunday. I HATED this on my iphone. I stopped deleting them and would just hit move and select trash.
 
Not working...

I tried this twice, to make sure I had it working, and it's not working. :mad:

This is quite annoying... anyone else notice it not working?
 
I tried this twice, to make sure I had it working, and it's not working. :mad:

This is quite annoying... anyone else notice it not working?
It worked for me, though I had to trigger a sync again before it actually did the delete over on the gmail inbox.
 
I got it to work. I was using an 'Advanced Setup' account, for this very reason before the fix. I had to delete that one, and just enabled Email syncing on my normal Google account, which I was using just for calendar and contacts. :)
 
you never really quite delete them. they remain on Google's magnetic tapes somewhere for them to be summoned by warrants.
 
you never really quite delete them. they remain on Google's magnetic tapes somewhere for them to be summoned by warrants.

Or you could live out your life online like Eric Schmidt had said at one point and just never put anything out on the internet you don't want people to know about.
 

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