I have a white macbook running Mountain Lion and, when I run Disk Inventory, I have 477K mail messages taking up 12GB of disk space and 8GB of "mail message part". The path is ~library/mail/V2/POP or ~library/mail/V2/IMAP and the files appear to be mail attachments which I thought deleted automatically when the messages were deleted. If I go into Library, then Mail, there are POP and IMAP folders for each email account and within each of those there are Deleted Messages, Drafts, INBOX and Sent Messages folders. Within the deleted messages folder, there is a folder with a long random string name and "info.plist". Within the random string name folder, there are two folders - Data and Data Rebuild. Where in the heck do I go to delete all these old mail attachments?! When I google this issue, I'm told they delete automatically but my mac seems to be storing them.
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How to remove deleted mail from hard drive
- Thread starter lilysquilts
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Quit Mail then reindex following this guide, then restart Mail. That should get rid of the old messages and their attachments.
Can't quit mail
I now seem unable to quit mail - I've left it sitting for 24 hours and I don't know if it's frozen or just doing the job behind the scenes - do I just leave it for a day or two to do its thing behind the scenes - could it be taking that long?
I now seem unable to quit mail - I've left it sitting for 24 hours and I don't know if it's frozen or just doing the job behind the scenes - do I just leave it for a day or two to do its thing behind the scenes - could it be taking that long?
It should not take that long. Sounds locked up. Just right click it in the dock and force quit then try again. When you delete those envelope files and start for the first time you should see a progress bar as everything reindexes.
Files not deleted
It seemed to go through the process of rebuilding the mailbox and I managed to quite but the files are still sitting there. They all seem to be attachments to emails - JPGs, dmlx files, zip files. I've tried a restart too but that didn't get rid of them. Any more suggestions as to what I can try or whether I need to keep trying the same?
It seemed to go through the process of rebuilding the mailbox and I managed to quite but the files are still sitting there. They all seem to be attachments to emails - JPGs, dmlx files, zip files. I've tried a restart too but that didn't get rid of them. Any more suggestions as to what I can try or whether I need to keep trying the same?
Hmm... dunno. That got rid of them all for me on my IMAP account. Is it both the POP and IMAP account doing this?
If it is just the IMAP and you don't have too many messages you could just remove the account from Mail and delete everything in those IMAP folders then readd the account and redownload your saved mail.
I'm afraid to mess with the POP account though if you have messages saved locally.
They do seem to be 99% IMAP so if I find no other way, I'll try the way you've suggested, thank you!