[General Topics] Menneisyys:
I, being the author of the Windows Mobile Mailer Bible, probably the best source of everything mailing-related, always receive several mailing-related questions. One of the most often asked one concerns mass selection operations to be able to quickly delete or mark (un)read several (or all) messages. The main reason for this is, for example, resetting the “new / unread mail” counter on your main home (on Pocket PC’s, “Today”) screen by quickly deleting or making read mail you know you won’t ever need – without the need to open and/or delete them one by one.

First, let’s take a look at how this is to be done in the two major flavors of Windows Mobile:

1.1 Pocket PC (WM6 Professional / Classic; devices with touch screens)

It’s very easy to mass-select your mails in Pocket PC’s. All you need to do is either:

mass-select the mails you want to mark / delete with the stylus and/or

if you have a built-in thumbboard, press Shift and the up/down arrow keys (its effect is the same as that of the stylus when mass selecting messages) and/or

if you want to mass-select all messages (not just some of them), bring up the on-screen keyboard and press Ctl and, then, A

After this, all mass operations will work as supposed to.

1.2 MS Smartphone (WM6 Standard; devices without touch screens)

Unfortunately, the touchscreen-less MS Smartphone platform works in a pretty much different way. First, let’s start with the built-in messaging:

1.2.1 Messaging

As with the “big brother”, the Pocket PC, there aren’t any menu-based mass selection capabilities built-in in the MS Smartphone version of Messaging either. This can be seen in the following menu shot:

As there’s no touch screen and/or on-screen keyboards either, you couldn’t use Ctrl-A without third party tools (more on them later).

1.2.1.1 A quick tip for easier one-by-one deletion

If you want to quickly delete messages (with a single press of the left softkey – warning, the left softkey is only assigned the “Delete” functionality in WM6 and above, NOT in WM5!), do the following: go to Tools / Options / Other / uncheck Warn when deleting messages in the message list:

This makes it far easier to delete mails. This, however, doesn’t help in making a mail read. The latter will always require two button presses per mail (as opposed to – again, only under WM6+ - one, when you delete mail) (Menu / Mark as read).

1.2.2 FlexMail

With the alternative, excellent mailer client, FlexMail, the situation is better as of the current version (FlexMail 4 beta; 03/11/2008).

1.2.2.1 (Un)read flag toggling

In the top-level Folder view, if you just press Action on the folder, you can quickly toggle the read flag of all mail inside:

You can also do the same in the folder itself (Menu / Mark):

In Messaging, you can’t do the same.

1.2.2.2 Mass selection for deletion

It’s, unfortunately, not possible to make a mass-selection with the built-in thumbboard / dialpad; neither with menus. At least Shift + arrow keys / D-pad didn’t work on the HTC Vox’s thumbboard (unlike on Pocket PC’s – the HTC Universal – or external keyboards). Other MS Smartphones (again, with a built-in keyboard) may be better in this respect.

With an external keyboard (probably also with the widely used ThinkOutside / iGo StowAway – I haven’t checked this, only with SOTI’s excellent Pocket Controller, where it does work), this MAY become possible: