How To Clean Up And Quiet Down Your Mac Messages App

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can clean up your Messages App and also quiet it down. 

It is important, every once in a while, to pay attention to your Messages App and its Settings. It could be filled with years of old messages taking up space on your Mac and you may be getting too many Notifications interrupting you too much throughout the day. 

So here I am in the Messages app and I just have some sample conversations. So, if you were to delete a single message you would select it here, just click on it once, and it gets a little bit of a highlight. You can barely notice it has been highlighted. But with a message highlighted you can press the Delete key and then delete that single message. You can select multiples just as you would in other apps. You would click once, hold the Command Key down and you can see I've selected these two messages. Or, you can click a message and then hold the Shift key down and it will select a range, from the first to the last, so you've got a bunch of messages selected. Then you press the Delete key and you can delete all the ones you have selected.

Alternatively, you can use Edit, Delete instead of the delete key or you can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on one of the messages selected and then select Delete. 

Now a lot of times people ask me questions about Messages and they don't mean these things. They're talking about these things here on the left. These are actually called Conversations. The conversations on the left and each conversation contains one or more messages. If you want to delete an entire conversation you can do it by Control clicking, right clicking, or two-finger clicking on a conversation and selecting delete as well. You can also use the Command Key or the Shift Key to select multiple conversations or Arrange and then Control Click, select Delete and it will delete these conversations. 

Now if you delete a message it's not totally gone. It actually goes into kind of a trash, a Recently Deleted Section. You can see it by going to View and then Recently Deleted. You'll see your conversations here on the left and can select them. You can recover those and put them back into the conversation or you can use the Delete button to delete them right now. Otherwise every time you delete something it will automatically delete after thirty days. There will be a little countdown here. 

Now messages takes up very little space, that is if they are just text or links. Photos or videos take up a lot of space. So you may want to get into the habit of deleting photos once you have seen them. Like for instance here I've gotten a photo. I can simply Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on this photo, after I've looked at it, and choose Delete. So it deletes just like any other message. The difference is you have actually saved some space when you delete photos and videos. In addition to that you can also see all the photos and videos in a conversation, even if the conversation goes back years, by clicking on the icon at the top of the conversation and then on the right here click where it says Photos. It shows you all the photos. You can select them, Control click them, and delete them here. If you want to save a photo before you delete it, you can do it. Notice Control clicking, right clicking, or two-finger clicking will allow you to add to your Photos Library, or you can Drag & Drop to the Finder. You can do that here from the right sidebar here as well if you bring that up. So once you've saved it and then go and delete it. This goes for other kinds of documents that you get as well. For instance here's a PDF. You can Control Click on that and you can delete it. You'll see another tab appear here, Documents. You can see everything that you've got. You can certainly drag these out as well. 

But if you've got a lot of conversations, a lot of attachments, and a lot of messages it may take too long to actually go through each one of them and see what's there and maintain it inside the Messages App. There is an easier way to look for large attachments. You want to go to System Settings. In System Settings, under General, go to Storage. Then wait for all of the storage amounts to be calculated. Then scroll down to Messages and click the little i button right next to it. Then you're going to see all of the attachments. You can sort them by size, so you can see the largest one or last accessed. If you're in a rush and you just near to clear some space certainly Sort By Size so you can see the largest one and then also look at the last accessed date. If something is recent you may want to keep it whereas if something is really old, and you don't even remember what it was, you probably can delete it with a little more confidence. If you can't tell what something is you can select it and then use Quick Look inside this interface. So press the Spacebar and it will show you a preview of what's there. You can also click Show in Finder and it will take you to that item and you can drag it somewhere else so you can save it. Otherwise you can select it, click delete. You also can Command Click to select multiple items or Shift Click to select a range. The press Delete to delete a lot of things at once. This is the best way to quickly clear out and clean up your Messages App from old large attachments. 

Okay, so that's great for kind of catching up. But how can you keep your Messages App pretty clean. Well, there are some settings for this in the Messages App under Messages, Settings. You want to go to General and you've got this very important setting here. Keep Messages and you can set it to Forever, One Year, or 30 Days. Now this is where people differ greatly. There are those of us that really don't care about saving messages. They look at messages as something temporary. You get the message and you're done with it. There are others who want to keep every single message they've ever gotten. A complete history and they want to Archive them and Back them up. Of course, you can be somewhere in-between. But if you think it is important to keep the number of messages down and keep things pretty clean, then you certainly can set this to one year or 30 days. Then try to practice the idea of saving any attachments that you get what you want to keep right away when you get it. Don't let it get to that age. 

Okay what about stopping your messages now from cluttering up in the first place. If a lot of the clutter is junk, messages you don't want, well there is a setting here for that as well. Under Unknown Senders turn on Screen Unknown Senders. Then in addition click the Notifications button there and then you can turn off Notifications for these unknown senders except for certain conditions. So read through these. Then the idea is you won't see messages from people that are not in your Contacts. So if the person's phone number, or in the case of some iMessages their email address isn't listed in your Contacts, they won't appear here and you won't get notifications. However, the messages still come to you and you can check them at your own convenience and decide what too do with them. You just have to go to View and then Unknown Senders. Then you would see any conversations that are from people that are not in your contacts. For instance if it is somebody you know you can mark as Known. You also can Delete by clicking this button here and note that when you delete you can also report it as spam to your carrier or iMessage. Also note that in Settings you've got Filter Spam. If that is turned On you can view all the spam messages you may get here and do the same thing. You can go through and delete them, report them as spam, or you can just completely ignore this section. Also if you get spam or something you don't want in one of these conversations you can Control Click on it and use Delete and often you'll see other options here besides deleting. Like for instance for this one you have Delete and Block. Also notice that if sometimes the message says Reply Stop to stop getting these messages, like it is political or maybe delivery notices that kind of thing, you actually says Send Stop and Delete. So it will send stop back to the sender and delete the conversation. You can clean up that conversation now and prevent more from coming in. 

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Now if you just want to quiet down a conversation, like this group conversation here, let's say you're just sick of all the notifications that are constant throughout the day, if you click on the group information there you'll see all the information of who's in the group and so on. Go down to the Settings and you'll see there's Hide Alerts. Turn that On. You'll still be in the group. You'll still be able to go to the conversation and see what is being said and reply. But you'll stop getting Alerts every time somebody in the group says, me too. Note you can do this for a conversation that is just one-on-one. It doesn't have to be for a group conversation. 

Now if you want to control notifications for all of your conversations that is done in System Settings. You want to look on the left for Notifications. Then you want to go down and find the Messages App. From there that is how you control Notifications for Messages just like with any other app. So you can set on your Mac where these appear. Do they appear on the Desktop. Do they appear in Notification Center. Will they show up if your Mac is locked. Do you want the Notification to be temporary so it just slides away on its own after a few seconds or stay there. You can set a variety of other things. The Badge application icon is what shows that number in the Dock next to the Messages app. You can turn that Off so you don't have that little red number there. Also if you get a ton of message notifications you might want to turn Notification Grouping On by setting it to Automatic or just by Application so it only really shows one group of messages notifications and not a whole list of them.

So if your Messages app is filled with conversations in Messages and is taking up a lot of space and you're getting way too many notifications about new messages coming in, hopefully some of these tips help you out. Thanks for watching.