DCortesi . blog » Delete Twitter Direct Messages

May 2, 2008

Delete Twitter Direct Messages

*****

This is a hack.
This is not guaranteed to work.
Twitter may change their website at any time.
I am not responsible if something breaks or you decide to delete all your DM’s.
Nor am I responsible if your friends get mad at you for deleting your sent DM’s from their Inbox.

*****

That being said, I’d like to introduce my DM Whacker, DM Deleter, DM Sniper, whatever you want to call it I created a tool to delete your direct messages en-masse on Twitter. After the recent debacle regarding direct messages being exposed, I definitely saw a need amongst some Tweeters do delete their direct messages.

I need to thank @chris4403 who posted his awesome Twitter Translate bookmarklet recently. Were it not for that, I would not have had the motivation nor the codebase off which to build my first bookmarklet.

With that introduction, I’d like to point you in the direction of the new DM Deleter. Simply drag the link that’s in that page up to your Firefox or Safari bookmark bar, navigate to your direct messages, click the bookmark and select your options to delete your DM’s once and for all. The tool allows you to delete all of your messages, or just messages from certain friends.

My apologies for the additional link, but I just wanted to reinforce the point that this tool will delete your direct messages forever. So, use it with care.

Feedback welcome. The ability to delete sent messages ~~will be added in as well soon~~has been added in version 0.2.4.

17 Comments so far
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Hi Damon! Many thanks for this bookmarklet. It works great on my Firefox 2.0.0.14 on WinXP.

Some feedback:

1. The parameter “dm’s with [____]” confused me for a while because I thought this meant it would delete any DMs that had the user-specified text in the string as part of the tweet.

Perhaps that confusion can be avoided by rewording the text to “DM’s with user: [_____]”

2. There are times when I want to delete DMs I’ve SENT to a particular user, but not the messages that they sent to me.

I can’t seem to specify this particular combination of parameters right now, because messages from the Inbox are *always* deleted.

3. It would be great if the pop-up at the end of the delete process told me how many direct messages were deleted from my Inbox and Sent items respectively.

There are times when the parameters I provide don’t match any messages at all, and I don’t realize it.

And folks with A LOT of direct messages can better appreciate the value of this bookmarket if they know how many direct messages were deleted on their behalf.

That’s all from me. Thanks again for this great bookmarklet!

@mdy Thanks for your great, detailed feedback!

The first two requests have been added in version 0.2.5.

Version 0.2.6 is out, and it displays how many messages you’ve deleted.

This is fantastic stuff, Damon! Thanks for such amazingly quick turn around on those suggestions! *thumbs up*

I love this idea, and just tried it on both FireFox and Safari. No dice. (Mac OS X)

Any issues you know of, either due to platform, browser or total number? I have 1,655 messages.

Thanks for this! Please click on my name to see my “select all delete: endangered species?” post - I’d LOVE for a similar setting for ALL tweets. That would rock.

Louis

I’ll have to see if Twitter updated their layout. Firefox and Safari on OS X is what I developed this on. I’ll check soon when I have a more reliable internet connection (currently on vacation).

[...] It’s a pain in ye arse to delete old tweets or DMs and there is no mass deletion tool (Damon Cortesi created a great hack that I tried to delete DMs - and it works - but it’s not a long-term [...]

Thanks so much! I had TONS of messages to go through, and that saved me a lot of time!

Okay, you are officially my hero. I had 252 direct messages from “Remember the Milk” and there was no way I wanted to sit and delete them one a time. I can’t believe how quickly your app got rid of them. Thanks for letting me choose which direct messages to delete as well. That was cool. You totally rock.

hey, thanks for this utility. first time I tried it, it didn’t delete any messages but when I ran it again it worked perfectly. gracias.

*bows down and kisses feet*

OH I LOVE YOU!!

You just saved me potential HOURS of deleting 200 dms one by one.

Oh I love the intertubes!

It only deletes 20 dm’s at a time. Then it just hangs. I can’t be to picky 20 at a time is better than 1
Using Firefox 2.0

it’s working now… thanks

Don’t know what I’m doing wrong: everything works well (dragging the bookmark etc.), I can see the options whether to delete all or only selected DM, but after I confirm “Are you sure….” nothing happens. I still have all my DM.
Any suggestions?

[...] http://dcortesi.com/2008/05/02/delete-twitter-direct-messages/ [...]

this works great on twitter, but is a little buggy with 3rd party apps like twinkle. i still see some dm’s that seem “stuck”. i logged out of my twinkle account and logged back in, but weird things are happening. i might have to do a hard restart.

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May 2, 2008

Delete Twitter Direct Messages

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