You should certainly be able to delete a rectangle spanning multiple pages of your buffer, as others have already said. I'm not sure what the issue is there.
I just thought I'd point out a useful alternative, which is provided by cua-selection-mode
, and which highlights the rectangle you are manipulating. Trey Jackson made a handy blog about it which shows all the documentation (or look in the source file, which is cua-base.el).
Place (cua-selection-mode 1)
into your .emacs and then you can toggle the rectangle editing mode on and off with C-RET
. When it's on, move point to drag out the rectangle. DEL
will delete the rectangle, and C-w
will kill it if you want to be able to yank it back.