Severe Mail.app bloat

[gnomeisland]

My local mail folder has grown to ~40GB yet the only mail accounts I have are two Gmail accounts (one personal, one Google Apps) both of which combined should take up less then 6GB. Any idea for the bloat? Is there a way to safely erase the folder and start from scratch?

 

[spinnerlys]

Have you used Disk Inventory X, GrandPerspective or OmniDiskSweeper to scan the mail folder for big contents and actually seen what those big files are? You can do that via Finder too though, but it may be important to find out what actually takes up 40GB of HDD space before you erase anything.

 

[Weaselboy]

Go to Gmail in a browser and in the settings there is an area where you can tell it which folders to display when using an IMAP client. Tell it NOT to display the "All Mail" folder under IMAP. The All Mail folder is a dup of what you already have in other IMAP client folders and adds a lot to the Mail space usage.

 

[gnomeisland]

Go to Gmail in a browser and in the settings there is an area where you can tell it which folders to display when using an IMAP client. Tell it NOT to display the "All Mail" folder under IMAP. The All Mail folder is a dup of what you already have in other IMAP client folders and adds a lot to the Mail space usage.

Alright, sorry to sound like a noob, but *where* is this option? I can see that you are right about the All Mail folder but I see no way of disabling it, either from the Gmail or Mail.app side.

 

[Middling]

Alright, sorry to sound like a noob, but *where* is this option? I can see that you are right about the All Mail folder but I see no way of disabling it, either from the Gmail or Mail.app side.

It's not a standard part of Gmail.

Go to the settings page for your Gmail account and click on the "Labs" tab.

Enable the "Advanced IMAP Controls" and save the changes.

Click on the "Labels" tab and you should now see check boxes beside each label which can remove them from your IMAP client.

If you don't use labels (i don't since i exclusively use Mail.app for email and not the Gmail web interface) you can add "[Google Mail]" as your "IMAP Path Prefix" in Mail.app under the advanced tab for your account. This will vanish the ugly YOURNAME@GMAIL.COM section in Mail.app.

 

[gnomeisland]

Thanks!

Thanks, that seems to have helped. I too don't use the web interface much so I'd never bothered to enable any of the "lab" features.

 

[Weaselboy]

Thanks, that seems to have helped. I too don't use the web interface much so I'd never bothered to enable any of the "lab" features.

Glad that worked.