Help Delete Text Messages by Date?

[iTeedee]

My S5 is getting full and I believe it's my text messages. The stock messaging app just crashes every time I try to load it. When I do get it running, the message cap appears to do nothing to the pre-existing messages. My messages kept getting restored from backup through several phone upgrades, from S2, S3, S4 and now to S5. I have over 10K messages each with several people and multitudes of others.

1. Is there a way to determine exactly how many text messages I have on my phone?
2. Is there a way to delete messages by date, ie all messages prior to say June 2014?

I have less than 1Gb of space left and my phone is slowly dying.

Thanks

Carolyn

 

[Hadron]

Try a different message app and set the cap on that one, and see whether that does anything different?

 

[iTeedee]

I've used ChompSMS and Textra, seems a lot of the apps don't allow for a message cap and those that do, like the stock app, don't seem to do anything with the hundreds of thousands there before their install. Do you have any suggestions of apps I could try that would do that for me??

 

[Hadron]

Unfortunately not. If those third party apps behave the same as the system one then its unlikely that others would be different, and as I never use that option I can't say from experience whether there are any that do differ. I'm afraid I don't offhand know of an app that has an option to delete all messages older than a certain date.

One way might be to back up your messages in a readable format (e.g. an app that uses XML for the backups), edit a copy of the backup (keep the original in case something goes wrong), then restore from the edited copy. The author of the SMS Backup & Restore app has some instructions for editing that app's backups here, which might let you do what you want (sort by date - if needed - and delete older ones), albeit with more hassle than is ideal.

 

[AZgl1500]

I use Textra....
I just hold down on one of the messages until the dots show up. Select Delete All..... then I unclick the last 2 or 3 in that persons conversations... then hit delete.

Textra has a Time Out, but I don't use it. I often go back to review older messages. Especially when it is with someone whom I don't converse with but maybe once every 3rd or 5th week.