Deleted Mail keeps returning to INBOX - please advise!

Please help me. I am trying to clean out my inbox because it has gotten out of control, I have over 4000 messages and I am trying to delete them in bulk.
This is what I have been doing: I highlight messages then select delete. Then, I go to the mailbox menu and select permanently delete messages - i have been doing this periodically throughout the entire process.
Then, at some point Mail quits unexpectedly. When I reopen the application ALL of the messages that I thought I had deleted are back!!
Any advice would be most appreciated.

Assuming this is a POP account and you can somehow manage to do the following without Mail crashing (you may take Mail offline to avoid new mail being downloaded while you try to fix the problem), try this:
1. Create a custom “On My Mac” mailbox (Mailbox > New Mailbox).
2. Instead of deleting the messages you don’t want to keep, move the messages you do want from Inbox to this newly created mailbox. Make sure that they are transferred correctly and you don’t miss anything.
3. Quit Mail.
4. In the Finder, go to the ~/Library/Mail/POP-username@mailserver/ account folder.
5. Locate INBOX.mbox and move it to the Desktop (to be deleted after fixing the problem).
6. Open Mail. A new (empty) INBOX.mbox will automatically be created within the account folder.
7. Move the messages in the “On My Mac” mailbox back to Inbox if that’s where you want them to be.
Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user’s home folder, i.e. ~/Library is the Library folder within the user’s home folder.

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    If anyone has been helpful to you, please show your appreciation by clicking the button inside of their post. Please click here and read, along with the threads to which it links, for helpful information to guide you as you proceed. I always recommend that you treat your BlackBerry like any other computing device, including using a regular backup schedule...click here for an article with instructions.
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