Chris Pratt accidentally deleted 51,000 emails while trying to declutter his inbox.

On his Instagram story, the Guardians of the Galaxy star revealed he has a staggering 35,944 unread e-mails sitting in his mailbox on his phone, and later confessed to having accidentally deleted them all — plus several thousand read e-mails — while trying to sort through them.

He said: "Yesterday my son [Jack] was playing with my phone and he gasped in shock, looking at the number of unread e-mails that I had, it's a lot, it's a lot. I get it! I know. It's mostly junk, see what I do is I sign up for everything. I'm one of those idiots who will do like an IQ test [online] that requires putting in your e-mail address."

Chris, 40, promised to shave the notifications down to zero by opening and reading 1,000 a day, but soon followed up his post with bad news.

He added: "Trying not to panic. I think I just tried something to delete anything unread and it just deleted them. So now I'm like, 'Oh no. I needed to read them. But I don't know where they went.'

"So if I owe you an e-mail, you might want to follow up on that. Resubmit, perhaps, the e-mail and then I'll read it. It may have just gotten deleted."

The Jurassic World actor — who has Jack, seven, with his ex-wife Anna Faris and is will soon become a father for a second time when his wife Katherine Schwarzenegger gives birth to their first child — then realised it wasn't just the thousands of unread e-mails that had been wiped from his inbox.

In another update, he said: "Fifty-one thousand messages are in the trash. Oh f**k. What did I do? It's just deleting them all. All my emails. Oh my God. This could be a real nightmare."

On the plus side, Chris says he's now looking at his clean inbox as a "fresh start".— BANG