How to Delete iMessages on Your Mac

You have multiple options if you’re looking to clean up the Messages app on your Mac. You can delete messages individually, clear entire conversations, or turn on automatic deletion. We’ll walk you through the steps for all of them.

Deleting Messages on Your Mac

There are a few options for deleting messages on your Mac. First, you can delete a single message—perhaps it contains credit card details or some other sensitive information. Second, you can select and delete multiple messages within a conversation without clearing the whole thing. Either way, we’ll show you the best and quickest way to get it done.

To delete a single message, open a conversation in the Messages app, Control-click the text bubble you wish to delete, and choose Delete from the context menu.

To delete multiple messages, hold Command on your keyboard, select the messages you want to delete, and press the Delete key. You’ll see a prompt confirming that you want to delete it from all your devices; click Delete if you’re okay with that.

If you want to remove the messages only from your Mac but not your iPhone (or other Apple devices), you’ll have to disable it in the Messages settings window:

1. With the Messages app open, mouse up to the menu bar and click Messages.
2. Click Settings in the resulting menu and select the iMessage tab.
3. Toggle off the Enable Messages in iCloud box.
4. Choose Disable This Device.

Clearing an Entire iMessage Conversation

To delete an entire conversation, open the Messages app and look for the conversation you want to delete on the left sidebar. You can either scroll through your conversations manually or click the Search field at the top of the list and type in a contact’s name.

The,n you can continue with any of these options:

• Use your two fingers to swipe left on the conversation and click Delete.
• Control-click on the conversation and select Delete Conversation from the popup window.
• Select the conversation, then click Conversation in the menu bar and choose Delete Conversation.

Deleting iMessage Attachments on Your Mac

The other half of deleting iMessages is also deleting the attachments that came with the messages. You can do that in Finder by following these instructions:

1. Launch a Finder window, then click Go in the menu bar and select Go to Folder.
2. Copy and paste this into the input box:

   ~/Library/Messages/Attachments

3. Drag the contents to the trash. If you don’t want to delete all the attachments, you can browse the folders and delete the attachments individually.

You can also open your Mac’s Settings app, go to General > Storage, and click the Info (i) icon. From there, you can see a user-friendly breakdown of all the attachments saved by the Messages app.

Select what you want (hold Command for multiple), and click Delete in the bottom-right corner to remove them. You can also preview what exactly it is by hitting space bar on your keyboard.

Setting Your Mac to Automatically Delete Messages

If you’re tired of manually deleting old messages and conversations on your Mac, you can set the Messages app to automatically delete messages after a specific period. Follow these steps:

1. Launch the Messages app.
2. From the menu bar, head to Messages > Settings.
3. Select the General tab.
4. Click the dropdown menu next to Keep messages and choose how long you want to keep your messages.

Now, your Mac will only store messages for the duration you set, and you won’t need to manually delete them.

You can quickly delete individual texts or entire iMessage threads on your Mac using any of the methods we discussed. But remember that deleted messages will also disappear from your other devices if you’ve enabled iCloud for the Messages app. So, be careful while tidying up the Messages app, and make sure you have a backup just in case you accidentally delete something valuable.