Trash Begone

Trash Begone
Eudora Tip #145/14-Aug-2002

One of my clients emailed me recently: “I find that the email keeps telling me there’s such-and-such trash (nothing to do with my ordinary trash bin). What is that, I wonder?”

And the answer: it’s the email trash.

When I collect my mail the messages arrive into various mailboxes. Once I’ve read a message and no longer wish to keep it I trash that message.

In other words, I move it to a special mailbox called “Trash”. It’s right there under the mailbox menu and you can see which messages you’ve recently trashed. In fact, if you now decide you need that message after all you can just open it up, print it, reply to it or do anything else you might normally do with a message. You can even remove it from the Trash mailbox and file it into another mailbox.

But suppose you leave it there. When you Quit Eudora she will warn you that there are messages in the Trash and ask whether you want to empty the Trash or not. If you choose to empty the Trash then Eudora will remove them from her system altogether.

As always though, I really should have added “depending on various factors” to the above statement. But first, let’s look at how to move a message to the Trash mailbox.

1. Highlight one or more messages in a list of messages and press the Delete key.
2. Highlight one or more messages in a list of messages and press Command D.
3. Highlight the messages and use the Transfer menu, choosing —> Trash.
4. While reading a message press Command D or Transfer —> Trash.

Remember, in each case this has simply moved the message to the Trash mailbox.

But what about that SPAM message you just received which is so vile you never want to see it again? You want to remove it instantaneously and never get it back. (Be sure about this one.)

Command-option-shift-delete really deletes messages. Try it on something you definitely don’t want and then look in the Trash: no sign of it. That key combination absolutely removes the message and bypasses the Trash.