Short Version: Mail apparently for some reason decided to re-download all hundreds of thousands of my sent messages to my laptop, eating up hundreds of MB of memory for messages that I know I already had downloaded / stored on my laptop. How do I un-do this action to reclaim my HD space, and prevent it happening again in the future? Is this indeed what happened?
More Detailed Version: I've been experiencing internet connectivity issues the last few days. As a consequence, I've not been confident that all my e-mails have been going through. I do all my e-mailing through the native Mail app, installed on my MacBook Pro (running OS 10.6.8, and Mail version 4.6).
Recently, to confirm that an e-mail had indeed gone through, I opened my "sent" folder to check that it showed up in there. At that point, a little circle appeared next to me "Gmail" sent folder on the left-hand panel (with the little icon of an airplane), and it started filling up like a pie-chart. I'd seen this behavior before, but usually only for a second or two when I suspect it's doing some sort of checking to be sure that all messages are in place. This time, however, the pie was filling up slowly, so I opened up my HD Info, and saw my memory disappearing. I quit mail, and the memory stopped disappearing. I opened mail again, and it started to disappear again as the pie progress chart continued to fill. This continued until it had eaten up a few hundred MB of memory.
My guess is it for some reason re-downloaded all my sent mail? However, I don't have "duplicate" sent messages now, and I already had all my messages downloaded before, so there was no reason for it to do this (I hadn't changed any mail settings etc.). How can I get my memory back? Is it possible this has happened more than once without my noticing? I do seem to have some kind of phantom "drain" on my computer's HD memory, and I am very careful about HD space management, so it's always been suspicious to me.
Any suggestions would be appreciated,
Many thanks.
More Detailed Version: I've been experiencing internet connectivity issues the last few days. As a consequence, I've not been confident that all my e-mails have been going through. I do all my e-mailing through the native Mail app, installed on my MacBook Pro (running OS 10.6.8, and Mail version 4.6).
Recently, to confirm that an e-mail had indeed gone through, I opened my "sent" folder to check that it showed up in there. At that point, a little circle appeared next to me "Gmail" sent folder on the left-hand panel (with the little icon of an airplane), and it started filling up like a pie-chart. I'd seen this behavior before, but usually only for a second or two when I suspect it's doing some sort of checking to be sure that all messages are in place. This time, however, the pie was filling up slowly, so I opened up my HD Info, and saw my memory disappearing. I quit mail, and the memory stopped disappearing. I opened mail again, and it started to disappear again as the pie progress chart continued to fill. This continued until it had eaten up a few hundred MB of memory.
My guess is it for some reason re-downloaded all my sent mail? However, I don't have "duplicate" sent messages now, and I already had all my messages downloaded before, so there was no reason for it to do this (I hadn't changed any mail settings etc.). How can I get my memory back? Is it possible this has happened more than once without my noticing? I do seem to have some kind of phantom "drain" on my computer's HD memory, and I am very careful about HD space management, so it's always been suspicious to me.
Any suggestions would be appreciated,
Many thanks.
