Delete Mails in Mac Mail without Trash

Question

How can I delete an email in Mac Mail instantly without moving it to the trash? I don't want to look at the spam crap twice :-)

UPDATE: I want to do this because I have some very old mails in my trash I don't want to delete at the moment (or decide what to do with). So I cannot delete my whole trash. But to avoid the trash becoming bigger and bigger I want to delete spam etc. without moving to trash...

Answer 1

Why look in the trash at all? Just set your Trash to automatically delete messages after a day. You can do that in the Accounts pane of preferences:

Answer 2

You can delete emails and bypass the trash using

⌥ Option + ⌫ Backspace

(Successfully tested with OS X 10.9 (Mavericks). Could work with older versions, too.)

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If you want to delete emails that are already in trash it is enough to hit ⌫ Backspace to delete them permanently. If you are accustomed to also press the ⌘ Command, like deleting a file in Finder, you can do so. But basically, backspace is enough.

Answer 3

All you have to do is any of the following:

• hold down the Option key, while clicking on the trash can on the top toolbar
• hold down the Option key, while clicking on 'delete' on the top menubar
• hold down the Option key, while right-clicking on the desired emails and scroll down to select 'delete'
• hold down the Option key, while pressing the Delete key on your keyboard.

Answer 4

A very old tip (2006) from MacWorld suggests using ⌘ Command+X to cut the messages and then just copying some text to wipe the clipboard. This seems to work, but Mail.app tries to copy the contents of those emails to memory - so probably not very useful for lots of mails with attachments.

Answer 5

Delete the message: ⌘⌫

Then empty the trash: ⇧⌘⌫