Every so often is not a bad idea Delete messages in our Mac. With the passage of time and constant use, the messages accumulate and on many occasions we do not need to save conversations that have a long time, which we may not continue with. In these cases, it is best to simply delete those messages or conversations and in this article, we are going to see how we can achieve it on our Mac or MacBook.
Delete messages on a Mac
The first thing we will have to do is select the conversation in the Messages app and then we will proceed to right-click on the specific message we sent. It can be a text, photograph, video or any kind of element. A contextual menu will appear with the Delete option, which is where we will have to click.
Once we click Delete, we will have to confirm this choice by clicking Delete again.
Delete conversations on Mac
In case we prefer to delete an entire message thread or conversation, we can do it in an extremely simple way.
In order to delete a conversation we will have to select it in the list on the left sidebar. After this we will have to right click and choose Delete.
We will slide from right to left and click on Delete (it is the trash can icon in red). We will select Conversation > Delete Conversation in the menu bar.
Now it will ask us to confirm our choice. For this we are going to choose Delete again.
How to delete multiple conversations at once
We may have many conversations that we want to delete. It’s easy to do, although we’re going to need to know the specific keyboard shortcut to do it.
- To select adjacent threads, we’ll click the first one, hold down the Shift key, and then click the last one. This will select all conversations from the first to the last.
- If we want to choose conversations that are not one after the other. So we click on the first one and we will hold down the Command key, then we choose the ones we want to delete.
Now the only thing left to do is right click and Delete. We select Conversation > Delete conversations in the menu bar.
To delete them permanently, we will have to confirm by clicking on Delete in the pop-up window.
Clear all messages on Mac
Perhaps we want to delete absolutely all the messages that we have on our Mac. We can use any of the previous steps to be able to delete conversations, although there is a faster way if we want to delete absolutely everything and leave no messages.
For this we are going to have to have Finder open. Then we will go to Go > Go to folder in the menu bar, enter the following and press Enter: ~/Library/Messages
In this folder we will have to look for the following files:
- chat.db
- chat.db-shnm
- chat.db-wal
After this, we will right click and select Move to Trash or drag all items to it.
After this, we will proceed to empty the trash on Mac as we would normally do and all the conversations will be deleted.
Automating the process
In case we do not want to delete messages manually, we can also configure the Messages app to delete them automatically from time to time.
For this we are going to open Messages and go to Messages> Settings. Next, click on General and we will use the Save messages drop-down box to choose how long messages will be saved. We can choose between: Forever, 30 days or a year.
Then we will be asked to confirm the action and we will delete the oldest messages.
After configuring the application, the conversations and attachments that meet the specified period of time will be deleted.
