Delete email in Mail without showing next message

Nov 04, '09 07:30:03AM

Contributed by: SeanAhern

One of the "features" in Apple's Mail program that has always annoyed me is how it handles messages after doing a delete operation. If you press Delete to throw away the message you're currently looking at, Mail displays the next message (marking it read in the process). While I like the fact that Mail marks displayed messages as read, I have always found it annoying that it displays a message that I have not specifically selected (and then marks it as read).

There's a way around this. Instead of pressing Delete, press Option-Delete. With this shortcut (which doesn't show up in the Edit menu), Mail deletes the currently-displayed message and then does nothing at all, and the next message is not displayed. This is exactly what I want -- I now must explicitly tell Mail when I want a message to be displayed.

I expect I can make this the default using the Keyboard Shortcuts tab in the Keyboard System Preferences panel, but I have yet to play with that.

[robg adds: It doesn't appear you can change the shortcut for Delete to Option-Delete, because OS X won't let you use the Delete key as part of a shortcut.]

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