How do I erase IM and e-mail correspondence from my omputer hard drive. Mac Comp l?

Delete does not mean entirely gone, it can be traced. Is there a way to eliminate e-mail and IM correspondance from being found.

How do I erase IM and e-mail correspondence from my omputer hard drive. Mac Comp l?
While I'm not very "Mac friendly" (99% of my experience lies in Windows based PC's), I'll try to help where I can.





When you delete something from your hard drive all you really do is remove the ability of your OS to tell where the data is stored on your hard drive. This in effect makes the data invisible to you, and tells your OS that the location where the file is located may now be used to record new data.


Certain hardware (and software) can take that hard drive, and locate that information again by reading the data directly from the drive (and bypassing the instructions left by your OS, indicating the file is gone). However, this is only possible if that area of the hard drive has not already been written over.





There are a number of ways you permanently remove data from a drive. One is to format the entire drive, however in some cases a professional is able to reconstruct the drive using sophisticated equipment.


Another way is to overwrite the data enough times that the data previously contained is unrecoverable by any means. This is known as secure data destruction, and there are several levels of erasure you can preform ranging from a simple single pass overwrite involving writing all data with zeros (equivalent to a drive format), to the U.S. Standard DoD 5220.22-M, which is a US Department of Defense triple pass algorithm, as well as many combinations inbetween.





There are software apps for windows (and likely for mac as well) that can be used to preform these sorts of secure erasures on either individual file locations, or entire disc arrays. I use Acronis DriveClenser myself, and prefer the "Peter Gutmann" method, which uses a 35 pass algorithm. It takes a long time to use (because of the number of passes) but is highly effective.
Reply:yea. for e-mail you go to history. you go to show side bar...you click on today(or whenever this happend) and there should be this whole list of sites you went on. you right click the one you want to delete and press delete and if you want to show you werent on that site you go to that url thing and click delete
Reply:no clue. why would it need to be traced anyways?
Reply:throw them in the trash. Click on the finder tab in the menu and choose secure delete trash.
Reply:not sure
Reply:No Way! It is there forever and ever like the sun and rain.