Deleting Messages

After you have read a message, you might want to remove it to keep your mail folders tidy. exmh uses two steps to remove mail. In the first step, you mark a message as being deleted. In the second step, you commit the operations on all marked messages.

Click the Delete button to delete the current message(s) or press d. A deleted message is highlighted after the delete operation. On a monochrome screen, a cross hatching is drawn through the table of contents line for the message. On a color screen, the table of contents line gets a dark grey background.

After you mark a message for deletion, you are automatically advanced to the next message. This makes it easy to go through your folder and clean it up.

Hint. If you are really in a hurry, use D and N as your keyboard shortcuts. These keys prevent the next message from being displayed, which can be slow for complex multimedia messages.

Click the Commit button to commit the pending delete actions, or type <Control-Return>.

If you decide you do not want to delete a message, you can unmark it. Use the Unmark (Undo) menu entry that is under the message More... menu. The unmark operation applies the current message or messages, so you have to select the messages to unmark first. The keyboard shortcut for unmark is u.

Hint. The minus (-) keyboard shortcut takes you to the previous message, even if that message has been marked for deletion. Ordinarily the Prev operation, and the p shortcut for it, will skip over marked messages.

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This file is from the third edition of the book MH & xmh: Email for Users & Programmers, ISBN 1-56592-093-7, by Jerry Peek. Copyright © 1991, 1992, 1995 by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. This file is freely-available; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. For more information, see the file copying.htm.