I have an AOL mail account, which I access using Thunderbird., and get 1000s of mostly promotional emails I want to delete. To mass-delete them, I use the following process: 1) sort by correspondent - this helps group the numerous promotional emails together as many are from the same senders; e.g: the 1,000 emails from ACME-JUNQUE will all be grouped together, followed by 500 from ACME-KUNQUE, followed by 900 from ACME-LUNQUE etc. 2) using the left-click then control-shift method I then highlight all or most of ACME-JUNK's emails and possibly also those of ACME-KUNQUE, depending how many I want to try to delete at once. 3) I then right-click and choose "delete selected messages". The actual deletion process that follows can take some time depending on how many emails I've selected to delete.

BUT - I then find that not all were deleted; I can see this easily when I look at the inbox counter. This seems to depend on the quantity. I can delete maybe up to a few hundred at once but beyond that they don't seem to get deleted. It's as if Thunderbird (or the AOL service) can only handle so many at once and the rest fall of the list. I will try to do some tests to quantify this - but I was wondering if anyone else has experienced this, and if so, is there a useful workaround? thank you