Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Mail taking up 30GB disk space

J

johnnyindia

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 4, 2010
106
0
I use the Mac Mail program to read my mail from my gmail accounts.

I used OmniDisk Sweeper and noticed that almost 30GB of space is taken up in this folder

library/mail/V2/mailboxes/recovered messages/BAFA(w/ #)/....

ANy idea on how to free up this space? I don't really need touse the mail client, and would rather have 30 gigs of free space back on my HD.

Thanks!
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Try deleting some mail, see if that helps.
 
johnnyindia said:
I use the Mac Mail program to read my mail from my gmail accounts.

I used OmniDisk Sweeper and noticed that almost 30GB of space is taken up in this folder

library/mail/V2/mailboxes/recovered messages/BAFA(w/ #)/....

ANy idea on how to free up this space? I don't really need touse the mail client, and would rather have 30 gigs of free space back on my HD.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

Didn't realize that Mail was such a memory hog.. Anyway to check how much space it's taking without using Omnidisk?
 
somehow that folder just jumped to 50gigs....is there something strange here? or does this just mean i have too many attachments or something?

whats the best way to delete all my mail? im just going to use gmail.com
 
jonomo said:
Didn't realize that Mail was such a memory hog.. Anyway to check how much space it's taking without using Omnidisk?
Click to expand...

Start the terminal app and type in the command:

Code: 
du -sk Library/Mail

and it will show you the space take in units of kilobytes.

I'm using 3.5GB myself.
 
i found a ton of 318.6MB files that look like this "67009.emlx" in my V2 mail folder using disksweeper

there are 40 GB worth of these when i look at omni disk sweeper.

can i just delete these? what are they?
 
Last edited:
.emlx are your mail messages.

Do you use POP or IMAP with gmail?

If it's POP, select your gmail account and do a Mailbox->Rebuild from the menu and see if this helps.

If you use IMAP, do the above Rebuild for each folder.

This may or may not help, but it's simple and quick.
 
what's happening is the application is locally archiving all your emails...this happened to me, to the tune of 500GB, yes 500 GB.

Took it too Apple, they cleaned it up in a second, turn off local archiving in the settings and you should be set...or start deleting emails.
 
rob14 said:
what's happening is the application is locally archiving all your emails...this happened to me, to the tune of 500GB, yes 500 GB.

Took it too Apple, they cleaned it up in a second, turn off local archiving in the settings and you should be set...or start deleting emails.
Click to expand...

Gmail only gives me 7,5gb of space, how can u guys have mails of 50 and 500(!!!!) gb?
 
what's the easiest way to delete all these messages? i no longer wish to use MAIL at all. I will stick to logining into gmail.

Thanks
 
yes, just go into settings and delete the account from Mail. There will no longer be any mail client setup to the application.
 
delted my inboxes yet disksweeper is still showing 30GB in "recovered mail files" and 10.3GB in "deleted messages"

there is a delete option on disksweeper. should i just click these folders and hit delete?

also, since I deleted my gmail addresses from my mail, does this mean that these 40GB of "recovered and deleted messages" are from something else, and I can use my gmail with the MAIL program and not worry about it taking up 50GB of space....where are these GB coming from?
 
johnnyindia said:
I use the Mac Mail program to read my mail from my gmail accounts.

I used OmniDisk Sweeper and noticed that almost 30GB of space is taken up in this folder

library/mail/V2/mailboxes/recovered messages/BAFA(w/ #)/....

ANy idea on how to free up this space? I don't really need touse the mail client, and would rather have 30 gigs of free space back on my HD.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

I had this same problem and this is how I solved it:

Go to www.gmail.com then go to Settings --> Forwarding and POP/IMAP.

Under the IMAP section, make sure Enable IMAP is on and Auto-Expunge is on. Then the important part: under the Folder Size Limits select Limit IMAP folders to contain no more than this many messages (I chose 1000).

This will severely clean up your Mail size (I think mine went down to like 20 MB or something).

The only disadvantage is that you can't use the Search feature in Mail, but it's not too big of a deal... you can just go to gmail.com if you need to search.
 
IMHO your "All Mail" folder is being locally stored and I presume you have huge amounts of data in your "All Mail" folder. I use GMail (two accounts, plus other email services) on Mail and have no problem. You can disable the All Mail download. Personally I like to have all my email stored locally in addition to GMail's servers as I am not a huge fan of cloud apps or storage alone, but to each his own. You could still use email via IMAP and just keep the All Mail folder from downloading, as listed above.
 
I am very aware this is an old thread but there was a lot of misinformation.

IMAP ONLY INSTRUCTIONS

In Mail.app go to Preferences. Select each account that you DO NOT need local storage of attachments and emails. Select Advanced and then below Keep copies of messages for offline viewing you will select 'Don't keep copies of any messages' to make the greatest gains. Alternatively, 'All messages but omit attachments' will give you more modest gains.

Just as with iPhoto Library it is not safe to go digging in V2.
 
I've also seen the out of control "recovered messages" folder issue before. The few times I've come across the issue is when someone has attempted to send an email with a large (>35MB) attachment using Gmail. Apparently this is over the limit provided by Gmail and rather than just give an error Gmail or Mail instead gets stuck in a loop of sending this message & attachment to a recovered messages folder.

This explains the steps needed to fix this situation

1.Take your gmail account offline from Mail and delete the recovered messages folder.
2. Download the widget to show the hidden files from http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/developer/hiddenfiles.html, or use the terminal commands defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE and then killall Finder. Once finished you can use the same commands but substitute FALSE for TRUE.
3. Go to UserName/Library/Mail/IMAP-<username>@domain.tld@imap.domain.tld/.OfflineCache
4. Delete all the data under .OfflineCache folder - DO NOT DELETE the folder.
5. Close Mail application and reopen.
Click to expand...
 
My library/mail folder is over 30 GB also.
I don’t even use the Mail app. What setting in mail does one need to change, so this does not keep accumulating in the future when the files are deleted?
I am reading that you can delete the Gmail accounts. But there must be some settings, so this type of accumulation does not occur, but previously, years ago, I had opened the Mail app just to try it out; but, I have not used it in years, yet it’s saving files, dad is somewhere in the folders that start with A and B. What happens if I delete these two folders which are the culprits within the mail folder. I don’t recall ever changing the default settings. Tempted to delete the mail folder entirely, and reinstall Big Sur to start over. How does this sound for an idea?
This came to my attention because of a problem, and I needed to reinstall Big Sur on my 2014 iMac, but said there was not enough room, although had nearly 100 GB of free space left on my 512 GB SSD. Deleted the snapshots, and still could not install in recovery mode, Big Sur. Finally transferred the Mail folder to an external drive, and created symbolic link to the Mail folder, deleted the mail folder on my SSD, and that solved the install problem. However, I don’t use the Mail app and would like it just to be in its default state without collecting mail, just keep essential mail that I could refer to if Gmail should go down for some reason.
Best, Seth
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back