One of the most talked about updates in iOS 10 was the iMessage app. Apple took a very simple texting app and added all kinds of nifty features that people enjoy in other messaging apps. With animated stickers, apps, message animations, drawings, group messaging, and even the option to send a poll to your friends, iMessage is one of the most fun apps to use. But months of iMessaging your family and friends can pile up, and if you don’t manage it, things can get messy. You need to know how to delete text messages on your iPhone.

You might want to delete an individual text message, or get rid of anything more than a month old. Even if you don’t want to delete an entire conversation, you may want to delete parts of a conversation that you don’t want to come up in a Spotlight search. There are several ways to delete text messages, and conversations, in the iMessage app, so let’s take a look at them all.

More: How to use iMessage on iOS 10

If you just want to get rid of a single message on your iPhone, this is how to do it:

If you like to delete a whole conversation on your iPhone, here are the steps you need to follow:

Maybe you’d like to delete multiple conversations on your iPhone at once. Here’s how:

It could be embarrassing, awkward, or just annoying to have certain text message conversations show up when you do a Spotlight Search. Here’s how to prevent that from happening:

What if you have hundreds of old messages and you want to delete them all at once? Follow these steps:

The chances are that the Forever option is selected. If you only want to keep messages for 30 days, choose that, and you’ll see a warning that all texts older than 30 days will be automatically deleted. You’ll see the same message if you choose 1 year — any messages older than 1 year will be deleted automatically.

If you are selling the device, or you are just conscious of security and you don’t want your iPhone to fall into the wrong hands and risk the chance that anyone can recover your deleted text messages, then follow the steps below.

Warning: This will delete everything on your iPhone, not just your text messages, so back up everything precious before you do this.

If you want to sell or pass on your device to someone else, this would be the way to do it.

If you sync your iPhone with iTunes, then messages that you deleted previously will be deleted from iOS so that they can’t be recovered.