If any of you movers and shakers happens to know how to purge ALL deleted files - even those uploaded/shared by somebody else - please share your wisdom, thanks.

Dropbox support is unresponsive, the opposite of awesome.

Deleted files that can’t be purged continue to take up disk space.

Users may think they have deleted sensitive data when in fact they have not (the deleted items are merely hidden).

This is bad for numerous reasons, including:

Unfortunately, there is no way for users to purge all deleted items. For everyone else, it’s important for you to know that Dropbox does not actually “delete” your files when you click to delete them instead, the files are simply hidden from your view until they are “purged”. So if anyone knows how to do this it would be great and super-appreciated. Thank you Dropbox team for adding this feature. From there you can select any/all items and select Delete from the dropdown menu. Just look for the eyeball icon to “show hidden files”. Update! Not too long after reporting this, Dropbox added a way to permanently delete any/all files.

Recover deleted items from dropbox