# Deleting Messages
by Brent Welch

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.