# Deleting all posts in personal message not working **URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/deleting-all-posts-in-personal-message-not-working/314953 **Category:** Support **Tags:** personal-messages **Created:** [July 4, 2024, 7:10am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/deleting-all-posts-in-personal-message-not-working/314953 "2024-07-04T07:10:18Z") **Posts on this page:** 1 **Showing post:** 18
### Author: ![JammyDodger](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/jammydodger/32/254611_2.png) [@JammyDodger](https://meta.discourse.org/u/JammyDodger) #### Post date: [July 5, 2024, 12:06pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/deleting-all-posts-in-personal-message-not-working/314953/18 "2024-07-05T12:06:02Z")
In the normal course of things, Discourse soft-deletes posts and topics, meaning that they still exist in the database and can be recovered at a later point if needed. These soft-deleted posts/topics get the red highlighting and are removed from view and inaccessible to most users (barring admins, mods, and any users in groups added to `delete all posts and topics allowed groups`). As moderators can only access PMs when they’re flagged, this also means they don’t have unrestricted access to deleted PMs in the same way. To view a list of deleted topics, you can append `?status=deleted` to a topic url (eg. `https://meta.discourse.org/latest?status=deleted`), however deleted PMs are trickier to find as there’s no collated list of them. You would be able to still see them if you had a link to them, and you can find them using the [data explorer](https://meta.discourse.org/t/32566?silent=true) if you have it installed. To permanently delete posts and topics, you need to enable a hidden site setting (`can_permanently_delete`) which would allow you to hard-delete them and completely remove them from the database. You can find more info on that in this topic - [Introducing permanently delete post functionality](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-permanently-delete-post-functionality/207109) Does that help explain things? --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/deleting-all-posts-in-personal-message-not-working/314953)._