I am a long time fan and user of Pegasus Mail (probably 20 years or so), so I was shocked to learn something new today, and what I'm wondering is: can this feature be disabled?

By complete accident (I was intending to press Ctrl-S to save an e-mail to HTML) I pressed Ctrl-D while reading a message and it immediately disappeared. It did not get moved to another folder and it did not appear in "Deleted Messages"!

As you know, if you press D or Del in a message, or in folder view with one or more messages selected, those messages are moved to the "Deleted Messages" folder. This is fine. That's not what I'm referring to.

After a little further experimentation, I confirmed that Ctrl-D does this "instant and hard" delete in the message viewer but not in folder view. In folder view, if you press Ctrl-Del, you get this same "instant and hard" delete, but not in message viewer.

I do not find this information in the Help file, but perhaps I missed it. I do have occasion to use keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl-C and Ctrl-S on a regular basis, so an accidental Ctrl-D is not an entirely surprising mistake on the rare occasion.

And, now that I think of it, there have been one or two times over the years when a message disappeared and I never did find it!

Does anyone know of a way to turn these two keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-D and Ctrl-Del) off?

Thanks in advance, and my apologies if this actually is in the help file and I just missed it.

(WinPMail version: Version v4.91.1746, 11 Aug 2025 18:19:07, build ID 1746)

Enabling this setting will result in a prompt for deletion.

Otherwise Ctrl+D and Ctrl+Del do the same as holding the Ctrl key down while clicking Yes to the delete confirmation prompt which is a hard delete (bypasses the Deleted messages folder if the "Preserve deleted messages..." option is enabled).

Edit: I find it surprising that the Ctrl+D behavior is different in a reader window than a folder window though.

Ah! Thank you so much!

Don't know how I managed to miss that for 20 years, but I did.

Much appreciated!!!

Sorry to be a pest, but if anyone's still reading this topic, I have one more question:

I see now that by checking that option that I now get a confirmation query every time I press Del or D or click "delete" to delete a message, even though the deleted message goes into "Deleted Messages", where I could recover it from. This is kind of a nuisance, given the large number of messages one deletes in any given day. I now see why I must have cleared that checkbox a decade or two ago. However, I don't like the idea that if I accidentally hit Ctrl-D I could lose a message totally with no prompt.

Is there any way to set it so that it prompts me for confirmation only when doing a "hard" delete?

Or can the "hard" delete functions be disabled entirely?

Thanks in advance!

No. The hard delete is optional, either through the use of the Ctrl key or by not enabling the "Preserve deleted messages until Pegasus Mail closes" option. The Ctrl+D action in a reader window is bothersome though, making me wonder if it is intentional by the developer. I will ask.

Thank you so much! I know this is kind of a trivial issue, but I do appreciate it. A fix would be great!

I have made David Harris aware of this. He asked me to pass along that he has added it to his to-do list for the next time he is working in the Pegasus Mail code. Don't hold your breath though. I agree with Michael that it will be a long time before we see another release.

Hey, if it gets fixed, I'll be ecstatic. Don't mind waiting. After all, it took me a couple decades to even notice what was going on!

Thanks once again.