ELM: Deleting (and undeleting) messages

ELM does its best to prevent you from losing mail messages through mistaken deletion. It just marks messages for deletion and does not physically remove them from your mailbox UNTIL YOU QUIT THE PROGRAM. If you have messages marked for deletion, when you leave ELM you will see

        Delete message? (y/n) n

If you press y the messages are removed as ELM exits.

You should spend some time understanding the sequence of events concerning deleted messages! There is no way to recover mistakenly deleted mail messages, so be careful!

Marking A Message For Deletion

To mark a message for deletion:

1. Select the message to be deleted.
2. Press d.

ELM places the character D in the first column of the main screen for the current message to show that it is marked for deletion.

NOTE: The message will not be removed from your mailbox until you leave ELM.

Notice that once a message is marked for deletion, you can't move the highlight bar (or the arrow cursor) to that message. To make a deleted message the current message, enter its number at the command prompt and press <Return>.

Undeleting A Message

To undelete a message, you just need to remove the deletion mark. To do this:

1. Make the deleted message the current message by entering its message number and pressing <Return>.
2. Press u. Notice that the D in the first column of the message list is removed, showing that the message is no longer marked for deletion.