jon zobrist (dot) com

iPhone Command of the Day, 6/2/2010

Howto delete all SMS messages on your jailbroken iPhone.

I frequently get hundreds to thousands of text messages that all say the same thing from my monitoring systems as part of my job. It’s *very* tedious to delete these one at a time, and paying my kids $1 per 100 to delete them is getting too expensive.

Yes, this must be a jailbroken iPhone. If you’re not jailbroken, upgrade to 3.1.3 and jailbreak using these instructions:

1. Sync your iPhone, let iTunes take a backup2. Upgrade your iPhone to 3.1.3 through iTunes
3. Once iPhone is 3.1.3 download and run Spirit Jailbreak (http://www.spiritjb.com/)
4. With iPhone connected, run Spirit and click Jailbreak
5. Wait for phone to reboot and you're done.
6. Go to Cydia, install Rock App

There is an app in Rock and Cydia that will delete all SMS but it SUCKS and routinely jacks up all your future SMS messages at random by inserting text and pictures into them. Fortunately, it seems the actual pictures and messages are not sent to the other party, but it does look on your iPhone like they were sent.

So I highly recommend NOT installing or using “Clear all SMS”.

Instead install “Terminal” from Rock or Cydia.

1. Launch Terminal
2. Case sensitive, type the below line and hit enter
rm ./Library/SMS/sms.db
3. It should just kick you to the next line, now reboot your iPhone