After youre done with your selections, open the context menu and hit Delete.
However, this also makes things more difficult when you decide you want to delete all of your iMessages.
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If youre worried about someone looking through your Mac and finding your messages, or you want to delete your messages for some other reason, doing so is, fortunately, relatively easy.
Lets take a look at what steps you can take to delete all of your iMessages from your Mac or MacBook.
The Problem Deleting your iMessages on a Mac is not the hard part.
Its deleting them permanently that requires you to know a few tricks.
When you normally delete a message or conversation and youre using the default iMessage settings, chances are youre going to recover all of them at some point.
Theres also a big difference between deleting conversations and just closing them.
Although the text may disappear briefly after you close a conversation, the messages reappear if you start a new conversation with the same contact.
So, how can you fix this How to Permanently Delete All iMessages From a Mac Before you start deleting messages, youll want to go to the Preferences menu on your iMessage app.
Under the General tab, you will notice the following option: Save history when conversations are closed You have to uncheck this option if you want to permanently delete your iMessages.
But this doesnt solve your problem with older messages that have already been saved under the previous setting.
Follow these steps to do so: Exit the iMessage app Press Command Shift G.
This brings up the Go To Folder window (Please note that it should say Finder at the top.
If it doesnt, click on your desktop before completing this step) Type in LibraryMessages and press Go Select the following files: chat.db, chat.db-wal, chat.db-shm, and everything else you might find there Move the selected files to the Trash folder Empty the Trash folder Open iMessage to verify if the operation was successful Note that this doesnt delete any attachments from the conversations, just the messages.
If you want to delete the attachments too, you need to perform the following steps: Exit the iMessage app Press Command Shift G to open the Go To Folder window Type in LibraryMessagesAttachments and press Enter Select all the files that you want to delete, such as text, archives, music files, videos, etc.
Move them to the Trash folder Empty the Trash folder This will permanently delete all of your attachments in addition to the messages that you previously deleted.
Alternative Methods If you want to avoid manually selecting the files to delete, you could always use the terminal and run a simple command line that empties the folder completely.
To do this, open the terminal and enter the following command: rm r LibraryMessageschat.
To delete attachments, enter the following command: rm r LibraryMessagesAttachments This will remove everything in the Attachments folder regardless if youve emptied the chat first.
Keep in mind that both of these command lines result in permanent action.
None of the data deleted can be recovered unless you have performed backups prior to the deletion of the files.
Erase Conversations Directly You can also erase messages from a conversation directly in the conversation window.
You can do this by selecting the message bubbles individually.