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If your email account exceeds the storage limits set by the account’s provider, you can take some actions in Mail to free up space on the account’s mail servers. Go to the Mail app on your Mac. Delete large messages or messages with attachments, or move the messages to a mailbox on your Mac.
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Aug 16, 2020 · We understand that the Mail app and its content is using up more space than expected. If you haven't already, follow the steps listed in the articles below to optimize your macOS storage. How to free up storage space on your Mac. Free up storage space for email accounts in Mail on Mac. Let us know what you find out!
Mar 14, 2022 · My goal is to free up storage space unnecessarily used - both on my MacBook Pro as well as in iCloud. However, when I go to Apple > About this Mac > Storage > Manage - my MacBook Pro still indicates that Mail is using 374 MB of storage on my MacBook!
Aug 23, 2022 · The space your Outlook data takes up depends on what you have in it. Starting with Office 2016, MS finally stopped using their old Mac database, which no longer required the separate tool to optimize it.
- First, Check How Much Space Mail is Using
- Option 1: Clean Up Mail Attachments Using CleanMyMac
- Option 2: Reduce the Space Mail.app Uses
- Option 3: Ditch Mail and Use Something Else
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By default, the Mail app wants to cache every single email and attachment you've ever received offline. This could take up tens of gigabytes of space if you have a lot of emails. On a Mac with a large hard drive, this isn't a big deal. But on a MacBook with a 128 GB SSD, this can be a significant waste of space.
Related: How to Free Up Disk Space on a Mac
To see how much space you might be wasting on email attachments, you'll need to check the source. Each user account on your Mac has a Mail directory in their Library folder---that's, or. This is where the Mail app stores its data for each user.
To see it, open Finder, click "Go" in the menu bar, and choose "Go to Folder." Typeinto the box and press Return. Locate the Mail folder, right-click or Control-click it, and select "Get Info." You'll see how much space is being used by the Mail app for your user account, listed under "Size."
What usually takes up the most space in your mailbox are all the attachments (such as ZIP files, images, or videos), many of which you likely saved in other places on your Mac when you initially received them if they were important. So unless you are keeping a historical email archive for personal or legal reasons, it's usually safe to delete them.
There aren't a lot of options for deleting your mail attachments from the local copy while leaving them on the server, but thankfully there is a piece of software that does this. CleanMyMac X has a tool that will look through your email and find large attachments. Assuming you are using IMAP (which is the default), it will leave the attachments on the server and only delete the local copy.
CleanMyMac X has a ton of other tools to help you clean up your Mac, so if you are trying to figure out how to free up some disk space, it can definitely help you.
It's worth nothing that you should use the "Review Details" button in the app to make sure you're only removing stuff you won't need locally. And make absolutely sure you have backups of your most important stuff before deleting anything.
Mail's library folder often grows so large because the Mail app downloads every single email and attachment to store them on your Mac. This makes them accessible entirely offline and allows Spotlight to index them for easy search. However, if you have gigabytes of emails in your Gmail account or elsewhere, you may not want them all on your Mac.
Luckily, you can save some space by telling Mail not to automatically download attachments. To do so, open the Mail App and select "Preferences" under the "Mail" menu in the bar at the top of the screen. When the preferences window opens, click "Accounts." Next, click the drop-down menu beside "Download Attachments" and select "None."
Once set, mail attachments won't be automatically downloaded, but they will be stored online until you need them.
Failing this, you can only hope to control the amount of messages Mail downloads via server settings on your email server. For example, Gmail offers a setting that can "hide" emails from the Mail app and other email client that access it over IMAP.
To access this setting, open Gmail in your web interface, click the gear menu, select "See All Settings," and click the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. Under "Folder Size Limits," you can select an option to the right of "Limit IMAP folders to contain no more than this many messages." This will prevent the Mail app from seeing and downloading all your mail.
Other email services may have similar options.
There's no way to disable Mail's space-wasting behavior completely, so you may just want to stop using the Mail app all together. Then you can delete those gigabytes of locally cached data, and Mail won't try to download any more emails.
Instead of the Mail app, you can use your email service's web-baesd interface---for example, Gmail on the web for Gmail users. You could also look for a third-party email client on the Mac App Store or elsewhere. Other email clients should offer an option to store fewer emails offline and limit the size of your cache to a manageable size.
To stop using the Mail app, first disable or delete your email accounts. Click the "Mail" menu in Mail app and select "Accounts." Uncheck the Mail option for accounts you no longer want to use Mail with. Mail will stop downloading emails from those accounts.
But this isn't enough! Disable the email account, and the emails will no longer appear in the Mail app, but they're still stored in your offline cache. You can delete the folder to free up the space.
To do so, open Finder, click the "Go" menu, and select "Go to Folder." Pluginto the box and press Return. Right-click or Control-click the folder with the name of your email account and select "Move to Trash." You can then empty your trash to free up all those gigabytes.
If you have multiple email accounts with cached emails you want to remove, you should delete each corresponding folder. You'll lose all the offline copies of your mail if you do this, but it'll still be stored on your email server if you use a modern email service.
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Mar 25, 2024 · Struggling with a Mac that’s running low on storage due to a bloated Mail app? Here are some hands-on steps to free up some much-needed space, ranging from simple clean-ups within the Mail app to more advanced tweaks for those who are comfortable diving a bit deeper into their Mac’s system settings.
Sep 16, 2024 · As you take the steps in this article to free up storage space, this storage information updates automatically. Optimize storage space Your Mac can optimize storage by using iCloud to automatically make more storage space available when needed. 2 And you can use built-in utilities to quickly find and delete files, apps, books, movies, and other items that are taking up space, then delete items ...
