Thread:Project:Support desk/How to clear large number of New Messages?

Been awhile since I have been here, and in that time the New Messages feature has appeared. And as a result, I have over 1,200 new message for me and I cannot clear them. Going to the new messages page, it take forever to load then I get a popup asking if want to stop the script as it is not responding. On that then partially loaded page, if I click on mark all as read button, then again it takes ages then comes up with an error that the server is having some issues / is overloaded, try again later.

How can I clear this backlog of messages?