Bulk Deleting messages - NOT entire conversations

[Danny Aaron]

I recently switched some accounts from exchange to IMAP through gmail.
I accidently created a loop where I had the the default email
forwarded to the gmail account and the gmail account forwarded to the
default account. As a result, i received thousands of Mailer-Daemon
messages. Each message attached 2 or 3 time to each of my 3000
messages. I now want to BULK delete all those Mailer Daemon messages,
but not the conversations.

How do I do that.

[Nick Chirchirillo]

You can not do this using the web interface.  However, if you use a program on your computer and connect to your account via IMAP, this can be done easily.  When a program like Outlook downloads your email, it downloads them as individual messages rather than conversations.  Once that is done, you can search for all the messages you want to delete and then move them to the [Gmail] > Trash folder.  This will remove those messages from their respected conversations while leaving all the other ones there.

--
-Nick

[Danny Aaron]

Thanks Nick

I was hoping that this would not be the case. I am in sort of a loop
with this. I am getting a sector 4 lock down from gmail. Until I clear
all theses MAILER DAEMON error messages, Gmail will not let me sync to
outlook or to apple mail. And I cannot delete the messages unless I go
into each one individually to delete.

[Andrew Ingraham]

> I was hoping that this would not be the case. I am in sort of a loop
> with this. I am getting a sector 4 lock down from gmail. Until I clear
> all theses MAILER DAEMON error messages, Gmail will not let me sync to
> outlook or to apple mail.

Are they really forcing you to delete the already-delivered emails?? Or
just making you stop any more from happening (by breaking the loop)?

> And I cannot delete the messages unless I go
> into each one individually to delete.

Can't you use some search parameters to select only the MAILER DAEMON
messages? Then click on 'All', and delete.

If doing that also deletes the 'real' messages from those conversations,
well it looks like messages are no longer grouped by conversation once they
are in Trash, so perhaps then you can go into the Trash and un-delete the
ones you want (again, perhaps using search parameters to eliminate the
MAILER DAEMON messages).

Andy

[Nick Chirchirillo]

Doing a search in GMail returns all CONVERSATIONS that contain a message that matches the search criteria.  By selecting all and deleting, Danny would end up deleting everything instead of just the error emails.

Andrew brings up a good point though... Do you still have that loop in place?  The loop seems to be what's causing the problems, so make sure the loop isn't there and you should regain IMAP access.  I have far more than 10,000 messages, and I never have a problem setting up another computer/program with IMAP access to my account.

--
-Nick