It’s tempting to simply ignore your inbox and let the messages pile up. It’s really important you don’t do this. If you’ve already read something, taken action on it by replying or putting it on your calendar, and have no need for a message on your Blackberry Pearl, DELETE IT.

As you let your messages pile up on your Blackberry Pearl, you’re taking up valuable memory space. To give you an example. Right now I have messages on my phone that date back to Sunday. I don’t know how many messages, but I’d guess it’s about 50 or 60. I currently have 3.2 MB of memory available. I’ve just deleted all of my message (more on how to do this quickly in a moment) and I now have 3.3 MB available. One quick action and I’ve freed up a bit of space. It’s not a ton, but it all adds up.

Here are a few options for managing and deleting your messages.

First step: Save what you need. Go through your list of messages and “save” the ones you think you might need. This is very simple.

Using your pearl button scroll down to the message you want to save, click on the ‘blackberry button’ (that’s the one with the 7 dots on it, just left of the pearl button). Scroll down to save and click on it.

Now it will be kept in a special “saved messages” folder. It won’t get deleted when you bulk delete your messages in your inbox (more on how to do that in a moment).

There are a number of options for deleting messages.

Delete only one TYPE of message. If you want to just delete your SMS messages in your out box, or if you want to only delete your MMS (pictures, video, sound) messages, you can do just that. Here’s what you do:

From your home screen, click on messages. Click on the “Blackberry Button” (remember that’s the one with the 7 little dots) and scroll down to “View Folder”. Select the appropriate folder and click your pearl button. At this point you can do one of several options. If you want to just delete one message at time, you can scroll to the message, press the Blackberry button and select “delete”. That can take a long time, so there are some other options.

Select and delete a group.

• Start at the top message of a group you want to delete.
• Press and HOLD the “shift” button.
• Use your pearl button to scroll down to the last message in the group.
• Release the shift button.
• Press the “Blackberry button”
• Select delete.
• That entire block of messages will be gone.

Delete all messages prior to a specific date

• Scroll to the bar at the top of each date (or the top of the entire list).
• Press the Blackberry button
• Select “delete prior”.
• All of the message from that date backwards will be deleted.

If you click the bar at the very top of the list of messages, select “delete prior”, you’ll delete ALL of your messages. Be careful with this option, you could end up deleting too many messages.

Note: If you want to delete your outgoing messages (SMS or MMS), you’ll need to go into that specific outbox under (View Folder) and delete those separately. You can use the same select and delete techniques as noted above.

That’s it. You’ve now cleaned up your messages and helped to free up extra memory on your Blackberry Pearl. There are several other ways to free up even more space on your Blackberry Pearl, but that’s a great start.