When deleting a message in mail, how do you get it to advance to the next message? whenever i delete a message it goes back to the previous message.

Question

when trying to delete a message in mail, i would prefer to advance to the next message. i delete a message and the curser goes back to an earlier message. i usually delete the most recent messages first.

Answer 1

First of all, you've posted in the Snow Leopard forum, but your profile says you're running Leopard, not Snow Leopard. What version of Mac OS X are you really running? You should always be sure that your profile matches the forum you're posting in, otherwise the "solution" to your problem may be totally ineffective.
Part of your problem is that deleting Mail messages depends on how you have them ordered. If they are listed in Descending Date order (most recent at the top), and you want to delete a series of consecutive emails from an earlier time, you should select the last one in that group and press the Delete key; with each one that's deleted, the selection will move to the next one up the list. You could also select the first one in the group, then Shift-click on the last one in the group and press Delete to get rid of them in one step.
If you have them listed in Date Ascending order (most recent at the bottom), you would have to select the oldest message(s) you want to delete and select it (or them) and press the Delete key, and the selection would move down the list to the next most recent message in the window.