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Know How To Free Up Space In Mac Mail From Wasting Gigabytes Disk Space

  author
Published By Mohit Jha
Nimisha Ramesh
Approved By Nimisha Ramesh
Published On November 18th, 2022
Reading Time 4 Minutes Reading

How to Free Up Space in Mac Mail from Wasting Gigabytes Disk Space?

We all use email services in our system whether it is Windows OS or Mac OS. In general, it does not seem that emails take up much space system hard drive. When it comes to using desktop-based email clients, emails with heavy attachments do occupy space. If you are a user with 1 TB hard disk, space might not be a problem for you. However, users with lesser hard disk space do face problem is such situations. There is no point of letting emails eat up a big chunk of your space when it is possible to keep the space free. In this write-up, we will know how to free up space in Mac Mail from wasting Gigabytes Disk Space.

How To Determine Total Disk Space Of Mac OS

First of all, we need to check the amount of disk space Mac Mail is using. Perform these steps to check disc space.

  1. Go to Mac OS desktop and then select the Go menu
  2. Choose the option Go to Folder and type this text in the box: ~/Library. Now press Enter
  3. Locate the Mail folder and right-click on it. Select Get Info option
  4. The amount of disk space used by the Mail application will get displayed on screen.

Mail Info

How To Free Up Space In Mac Mail – Two Manual Techniques

There are two manual techniques that will help users free up disk space. One is by using CleanMyMac utility and another one is by Apple Mail itself. We will discuss both the methods in this section.

Use CleanMyMac To Clean Up Attachments Of Mac Mail

It is evident that mailbox space is taken mostly by the attachments coming with the emails. Many of the attachments we receive are unnecessary. CleanMyMac tool searches every email and finds out the emails containing large attachments. To use this tool, click on Review Details. Make sure that you delete only the files that are not required locally.

CleanMyMac

Use Apple Mail Application

If we investigate the reason behind large-sized mailboxes, we will find out that Mail application is mainly responsible for this. It downloads all emails along with attachments to Mac OS, thus taking up hard drive space. It is done mainly to allow access to emails during offline mode. Still, you sure do not want all of your emails from Gmail account that might be gigabytes in size to be saved in the local system.

There used to be a simple method of managing cached emails. Changing the option “Keep copies of messages for offline viewing” to “Don’t keep.” Now that this option has been removed from Mac OS X Mavericks, there is no way left to tell Mail application not to download all messages. However, we can still instruct Mail app not to download attachments automatically. Here is the complete instruction to enable this option:

  1. Open Mail app and go to Mail menu. Click on Preferences option
  2. Click on Accounts option and choose the account where you want to implement the settings
  3. Select the Advanced tab. Uncheck the box beside “Automatically download all attachments” to disable this option.

Automatically download all attachments

If this process fails to free up hard drive space, users can try changing server settings of your email server. For Gmail, there is a setting that will hide emails from Mail app and other emails that use IMAP. Open Gmail account and click on gear icon to select Settings option. Select “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab and select the radio button of “Limit IMAP folders to contain no more than this many messages” option. Also, keep the number of emails in this option as minimum as possible.

How to Free up Space in Mac Mail - Solved

Conclusion

Hard drive with sufficient free space ensures better performance of applications and overall system. We have shared different methods for freeing up Mac Mail space in this post. Reading this, users will know how to free up space in Mac Mail from wasting gigabytes Disk Space. It is expected that they would perform the techniques and enjoy better performance of Mac Mail free of unnecessary emails.