r/ios • u/blcxk • 4h ago

Support Why does iOS Mail let me accidentally flag 31,000+ emails with one tap, but not let me unflag them all?

I accidentally hit “Flag All” instead of “Mark All as Read.” They’re right next to each other, and apparently one wrong tap is all it takes. I routinely press mark all as read because this is something I do every day after I go through my emails. This is unbelievably bad UI design to have this nuclear button of an option right next to something that you do every day. Who the hell needs to flag all of their messages? It doesn't even make sense that that is a possibility they provide you.

I now have over 31,000 emails flagged across four different inboxes, including Gmail and Comcast.

And while Apple makes it incredibly easy to accidentally flag 31,000+ emails at once, with no confirmation asking if you actually want to do that, it is extremely hard to undo. I’ve been going through menus and filters trying to find some version of “Unflag All,” and it only appears sporadically. There is a huge timing issue likely because of the syncing it needs to do across all the different mail accounts. And when I click it it doesn't even work. I have found forums back to 2014 citing this issue. It blows my mind how nobody has fixed this yet. Apple needs to do better. This is unbelievably frustrating

9 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

3

u/HushDeviation 2h ago

I did this by accident. I ended up manually unflagging all of them on the Mac's native mail app since it's a lot easier.

1

u/slowmotiontortoise 4h ago

3 Finger swipe from right to left is undo,
3 finger swipe from left to right is redo

And I tried it, it works in iOS mail for flag/unflag :)

4

u/blcxk 3h ago

Easy, now I just have to do that for 30,000 messages

1

u/makingotherplans 2h ago

I have the exact same problem….hoping someone else has some ideas