iPhone maintenence time

Tuesday, March 25, 2008 by Dave Winer.

Let's see -- I've had my iPhone since June 29, so that's... 

number (clock.now () - date ("6/29/2007")) / (60*60*24) 

270 days. In that time apparently it's been downloading all my non-spam mail from Gmail, and now periodically interrupts me to say my mailbox is 92 percent full, would I please delete some of my mail.  

I finally had a minute, on the BART the other day, to look into deleting mail, and it appears to be an onerous process to do for thousands of messages. First you tap the mail message, then tap the red minus sign, then tap the Delete button. They want to be sure you're sure (no Undo).  

Problem is -- I only use the Mail app to send pictures to Flickr. On the rare occasion that I want to check email on my iPhone, I just use the excellent mobile version of Gmail. So I never want the email from the Mail app. 

So I guess I have two questions: 

1. How to mass-delete all the mail that's filling up 92 percent of the allocated space.  

2. How to tell the mail app that I don't want it to fetch mail. (This is probably something I'm paying a fair amount for, btw.) 

Any suggestions would be most welcome. (And I suspect the iPhone Nazis out there will use this as an example of my ineptitude for years to come. Have fun!) 

Bonus: The Soup Nazi from Seinfeld.  

PS: I've tried deleting the account and adding it back. No luck. The mail is still there.  

PPS: Apparently mass-delete is new with iPhone 2.0.