You can have those deleted emails removed forever each time you quit Mail, or you can even set the Trash mailbox to never empty. Once you delete an email, it sits in the Trash mailbox for a while. With a right-click on an email in an inbox, select Archive or Delete to dispose of the email. Personally, I use archive for those emails that I don’t want cluttering my inbox but also don’t want to delete for good. With iCloud Mail, you have a choice of trashing or archiving email. Trashed mail will eventually be deleted for good, while archived email remains in an archive folder forever where it can be searched and retrieved if necessary. There’s a difference between trashed and archived email. The deleted mail ends up in either a Trash or Archive mailbox (see image below): Deleted emails end up in the Trash or Archive mailboxes Where the heck did it go? Believe it or not, it’s not actually gone from your email system. Last, but not least, you can click on an email and select Edit > Delete from the menu bar.

You can also right-click a message and select Delete from the pop-up menu, or highlight a message by clicking on it, then press the Delete key on the Mac keyboard. (Deleting a highlighted email in Apple Mail on the Mac.) You can either click that button or swipe it even further to the left and it’s deleted automatically (see screenshot below). You delete it, and it’s gone… or is it? In this Tech Tip, we’ll discuss what Apple Mail does with those trashed emails, whether or not you can get them back, and more.ĭeleting emails in Apple Mail is easy to do: just swipe (on a Magic Mouse or Trackpad) a mail message to the left and a bright red Delete button appears. Many Mac users never give deleted emails a second thought.

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