How to delete all of your email on Yahoo Mail or easily archive your inbox

The "Select All" tool only selects messages displayed on the screen, so you may need to use it more than once.
Alternatively, the "Clean your Inbox" tool works more efficiently and preserves messages in an archive in case you need them again.
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If you've had a Yahoo Mail account for a while, you may have an enormous number of email messages in your inbox. Luckily, in the name of decluttering, Yahoo gives you a few tools for deleting all your messages at once.

You have two options for cleaning up your inbox: You can delete all your emails outright, which has a few disadvantages, or you can archive your messages. Archiving emails removes them from the inbox, but preserves them in case you ever need to get to them again in the future.

How to delete all of your email on Yahoo Mail

You can permanently delete all your messages, but the disadvantage is exactly that. If you ever need to reference a message in the future, it's gone and can't be recovered. In addition, this feature is time-consuming, since it doesn't always allow you to truly select all the messages at once.

1. Open Yahoo Mail in a web browser.

2. Click the checkbox at the top of the browser, above the inbox. If you see the drop-down menu, click "All." Otherwise, it should select all automatically. Note that this only selects the messages displayed on your screen.

How do I delete all emails on Yahoo 1 Dave Johnson/Business Insider

3. To select more messages, scroll down to see all the messages in the inbox.

4. Click the checkbox arrow again to click "All." You should now see that all the messages are selected.

5. Click "Delete" and confirm this is what you want to do.

6. If that still doesn't delete all the messages in your inbox, repeat the process until they're all removed.

How to archive all of your email on Yahoo Mail

If you want to clean up your inbox but don't necessarily need to permanently delete them, archive your messages instead. Yahoo provides a one-click tool for doing this, which is generally more efficient than deleting, since you don't need to scroll, select, and delete more than once.

1. Open Yahoo Mail in a web browser.

2. Hover the mouse over "Inbox" in the navigation pane on the left and click the drop-down arrow.

3. Choose "Clean your Inbox."

How do I delete all emails on Yahoo 2 Dave Johnson/Business Insider

4. In the pop-up window, click "Archive emails." Depending upon how many messages you have, this might take a while, but when it's done, your inbox will be empty and all the email will be moved to the Archive folder.

How do I delete all emails on Yahoo 3 Dave Johnson/Business Insider

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