How to Stop Your Mac’s Mail App From Wasting Gigabytes of Space

Working with Apple’s Mail app on a Mac? You could be dropping gigabytes of place from attachments that you could be putting to far better use. Here’s what you can do about it.

To start with, Test How Substantially House Mail is Using

By default, the Mail application desires to cache every one electronic mail and attachment you have ever acquired offline. This could get up tens of gigabytes of area if you have a whole lot of emails. On a Mac with a large hard drive, this is not a major deal. But on a MacBook with a 128 GB SSD, this can be a important squander of space.

To see how significantly space you may be squandering on email attachments, you are going to need to have to check the resource. Just about every consumer account on your Mac has a Mail directory in their Library folder—that’s ~/Library/Mail , or /Consumers/[NAME]/Library/Mail . This is the place the Mail app outlets its information for every single person.

To see it, open up Finder, click on “Go” in the menu bar, and decide on “Go to Folder.” Kind ~/Library into the box and push Return. Track down the Mail folder, right-simply click or Control-simply click it, and decide on “Get Data.” You are going to see how significantly house is becoming applied by the Mail application for your consumer account, outlined less than “Size.”

When you are finished, near the Mail Details window and the Library window in Finder. If you’ve identified that Mail is applying up extra room than you expected, it is time to consider motion.

Possibility 1: Clear Up Mail Attachments Making use of CleanMyMac

What ordinarily can take up the most area in your mailbox are all the attachments (this sort of as ZIP documents, photos, or videos), quite a few of which you probably saved in other locations on your Mac when you initially gained them if they ended up essential. So except if you are preserving a historical e-mail archive for private or legal motives, it’s ordinarily secure to delete them.

There are not a lot of possibilities for deleting your mail attachments from the area duplicate though leaving them on the server, but luckily there is a piece of software that does this. CleanMyMac X has a instrument that will glance by your e mail and uncover massive attachments. Assuming you are applying IMAP (which is the default), it will leave the attachments on the server and only delete the regional copy.

Warning: Right before deleting everything on your Mac, make absolutely sure you have backups in scenario you unintentionally delete something important by oversight.

CleanMyMac X has a ton of other instruments to support you clean up up your Mac, so if you are striving to figure out how to cost-free up some disk place, it can undoubtedly assistance you.

It is value absolutely nothing that you should really use the “Review Details” button in the application to make positive you are only getting rid of things you won’t need to have domestically. And make certainly absolutely sure you have backups of your most crucial things in advance of deleting just about anything.

Relevant: How to Back Up Your Mac and Restore Data files With Time Device

Choice 2: Reduce the Area Mail.app Works by using

Mail’s library folder normally grows so big because the Mail application downloads each and every single e-mail and attachment to shop them on your Mac. This would make them available entirely offline and permits Highlight to index them for quick search. Nevertheless, if you have gigabytes of e-mail in your Gmail account or elsewhere, you may not want them all on your Mac.

Fortunately, you can conserve some house by telling Mail not to automatically obtain attachments. To do so, open the Mail Application and choose “Preferences” below the “Mail” menu in the bar at the top rated of the display. When the preferences window opens, simply click “Accounts.” Following, click the drop-down menu beside “Download Attachments” and select “None.”

As soon as established, mail attachments won’t be quickly downloaded, but they will be saved on the web until eventually you need them.

Failing this, you can only hope to regulate the volume of messages Mail downloads via server settings on your email server. For illustration, Gmail gives a setting that can “hide” emails from the Mail app and other email client that entry it above IMAP.

To entry this placing, open up Gmail in your world-wide-web interface, click on the gear menu, decide on “See All Configurations,” and click the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. Underneath “Folder Dimensions Restrictions,” you can decide on an solution to the right of “Limit IMAP folders to incorporate no more than this a lot of messages.” This will reduce the Mail application from seeing and downloading all your mail.

Other electronic mail solutions may have similar alternatives.

You could also theoretically halt Mail from applying IMAP and rig it up to use POP3 and SMTP to obtain and mail e-mail. You could then delete mails from your Mail application and they’d be deleted on your pc, but not on your e mail server. POP3 really is not suitable for a modern day email procedure, but this would give you e-mail notifications with Mail and enable you to mail messages from it although leaving your archive exclusively on your e-mail server.

Linked: Email Fundamentals: POP3 is Out-of-date Be sure to Switch to IMAP Today

Option 3: Ditch Mail and Use A little something Else

There’s no way to disable Mail’s house-wasting behavior absolutely, so you might just want to quit making use of the Mail app all alongside one another. Then you can delete these gigabytes of locally cached info, and Mail will not try to down load any additional e-mail.

As an alternative of the Mail app, you can use your e mail service’s web-baesd interface—for instance, Gmail on the world wide web for Gmail buyers. You could also search for a third-party e-mail shopper on the Mac App Store or in other places. Other email shoppers must supply an possibility to store fewer e-mail offline and limit the dimension of your cache to a workable size.

To cease making use of the Mail application, to start with disable or delete your e-mail accounts. Click the “Mail” menu in Mail app and pick “Accounts.” Uncheck the Mail possibility for accounts you no extended want to use Mail with. Mail will cease downloading email messages from all those accounts.

But this is not sufficient! Disable the e mail account, and the e-mails will no for a longer period seem in the Mail application, but they are however saved in your offline cache. You can delete the folder to absolutely free up the space.

Warning: Just before deleting your email messages on your Mac, make confident you have backups in situation you unintentionally delete essential e-mails by oversight. If the e-mails aren’t continue to on the server, you won’t be able to get them back again!

To do so, open up Finder, click on the “Go” menu, and select “Go to Folder.” Plug  ~/Library/Mail/V2 into the box and press Return. Ideal-click on or Command-click the folder with the identify of your electronic mail account and select “Move to Trash.” You can then vacant your trash to cost-free up all people gigabytes.

If you have multiple email accounts with cached email messages you want to take out, you should delete each and every corresponding folder. You are going to shed all the offline copies of your mail if you do this, but it’ll however be stored on your email server if you use a modern-day email company.

When you are performed, shut the Mail Library folder in Finder.

Other people today have their have tricks. Some individuals advocate developing a separate e-mail account you can use to archive e-mails. Ahead all your e-mails there and then delete them from the “working” e-mail account you retain in Mail to help you save space when you no more time require them. But that is a soiled hack of a resolution, and if you have to have to go that significantly, you may possibly just want to use a various email client instead. Good luck!

Connected: How to Insert or Eliminate Email Accounts in Mail for Mac