Please help. Inbox getting flooded by GMail!

[Moridan]

So I got my brand new retina Macbook last night. First Mac I've ever owned. So far, I'm loving.

But what I'm not loving is the fact that the email app is attempting to download every email that's ever passed through my GMail account(s) (more than 20k emails).

How do I get new emails to show up, but not have the Mac download all the old emails? What am I missing?

Thanks!

 

[AirThis]

It's difficult to tell from your description, but I think you've configured Mail for POP instead of IMAP.

Basically, POP downloads your mail from the server and stores the messages locally. IMAP on the other hand keeps the mails on the server (with the entire folder structure) and lets you access them from multiple devices.

I suspect that you previously had a email account configured for IMAP and now have configured it as a POP account in Mail. I did this by mistake once and all my neatly arranged emails were downloaded from the server and stored in my inbox on my local machine.

My suggestion is to check your settings in Mail and see if 'POP' is being used.

Edit: I've included a screen cap to give you an idea what the options look like when you configure your email account in Mail. As you can see, 'POP' appears to be the default option

 

[Moridan]

Thanks for the suggestion. I checked and they both say "Google IMAP".

For what it's worth, I'm running OSX 10.8.1

 

[Mal]

Go into Gmail's preferences (via the website) and tell it not to sync the All Mail folder via IMAP. That should help with that.

jW

 

[Moridan]

Go into Gmail's preferences (via the website) and tell it not to sync the All Mail folder via IMAP. That should help with that.

jW

That seemed to do the trick. Thanks!