How do you delete a email without opening it

Right click or Control-click the email and you get a drop down, choose delete.

As far as I know, Ralph, that will still open it. The way to do this is to double click on the horizontal screen divider in Mail, which will expand it, then delete the message.

EDIT: Btw, one nice little trick you can use with this when the page is expanded, is to hit Cmd-Shift-S, which will save a copy of the contents of the message to the Desktop in TextEdit. That way, you can see what's in a message you suspect as being spam without having to open it.

Message was edited by: WZZZ

On my MBP with 10.8.2 it didn't open only gave the drop down.

That would explain it. With my 10.6, it opens and I think that's also true of 10.5. Also one caveat if saving a message without opening it: I've never investigated this further, but sometimes when I do this either Mail or TextEdit, I forget which now, will attempt to connect to some usually suspicious URL, which I always deny from Little Snitch.

I am unable to do this anymore in Mavericks... has anyone figured out how to delete an email without opening it, in Mavericks?

Excellent 'Nice little trick'.

Hi, I'm not on MavX right now to check, but in 10.5.8, if the little tick at the bottom of the message list is dragged to he bottom of the window, so no view of the email content is shown, it appeas you can select an email without opening it, then hit Delete key.

Control-click on the email you want to delete and you'll get a menu with "delete" as an option. It does then open the next email, and I haven't figured out how to select multiple emails without opening one of them yet. Good luck!

It is a slow process but what I found worlds is to click on the email you want to delete and drag it to the trash bin and drop it there and that will delete the email without opening it. This is using Mavericks

ctrl+click does not work for me, but ctrl+rightclick does (on OS 10.10.1)

I can't get either click to work for me and i have 10.10.1

You need to hide the message preview pane.

To do this, drag the bar that separates the message pane from the mailbox pane all the way to the right.
Then you can select and delete multiple emails.

delete email without opening it in Outlook Express follow these steps:

1. Click on View from the menus

2. Click Layout

3. Uncheck the box next to “Show Preview Pane”

4. Click OKry.

Go to Junk Mailbox;

Hit <Command><A>

Hit <Delete>