With the advent of digital marketing and online services, email notifications and constant updates through email have gone up drastically. Users generally tend to delete such communication, moving it to the Trash. Other annoyances such as constant spam emails are filtered by modern email clients. A frustrating new bug (spotted by AndroidPolice) in Gmail for Android prevents users from clearing the contents in the Trash or Spam folders completely.
It is not clear as to when this bug was introduced, or if it was through an app update or an issue from the server-side. Previously, users could clear all the items in the Trash or Spam folders through an option at the top of the folder that read ‘Empty trash now’ or ‘Empty spam now’. With the introduction of the bug, that option now seems to have gone away.
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Users who want to delete multiple items can do so by selecting them and manually hitting the delete icon. Alternatively, items in the Trash folder are automatically deleted in 30 days. Deleting items from the Spam folder, however, sends it to Trash, so it is a double effort to delete those.
Fortunately, there are a couple of simple workarounds to the bug. Changing the phone’s orientation should result in the ‘Empty now’ buttons appearing. Users can also open any email from the said folders and navigate back to the folder, after which the options to empty the items appear. However, these actions are to be performed every time the app is reopened. The Gmail team has acknowledged the issue on a support forum post and adds that the engineers are working on a fix.