40 GB large folder in User/Library/Mail

Hi, my 2 accounts which has aproximately on gmail.com about 2,5 GBbytes has in my computer crazy 40 GBytes?

Have you looked inside the Mail folder to see what is taking up so much space?

I hope, that this will read somebody from Aplle, because this is really huge mystake in your almost flawless EMAIL client!!!

1) Nobody from Apple is reading these boards... these forums are user-to-user forums.

2) Why do you feel this is somehow Apple's fault when you don't know what the cause is?

BTW, I'm not begginer with MAC (I'm Mac possitive from Tiger and this is my 3rd Laptop, but I guess that could be the last ONE!!

Good luck not having problems with that other system... especially if, at the first sign of trouble, you throw a little hissy fit and throw around a bunch of blame.

A more productive approach would be to start troubleshooting. The first thing I would do is to see what is in the Mail folder and what is taking up the space. A good tool that will help with this is [OmniDiskSweeper|http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper>, which will show you sizes of stuff on your hard drive. It tells me that my Mail folder is 234.4 MB. (I have six accounts, including a GMail account.) Looking inside, OmniDiskSweeper tells me most of the space is taken up by the Mailboxes folder, and then I can look in there and see which mailboxes are taking up the most space.

You also may be the cause of your own problems. If you have set Mail to not delete sent messages and to not store them on the server, and you have sent a lot of messages with large attachments, they'll still be sitting in your Sent box, taking up space.

Hello,

I do not see any such comparison of Gmail storage use stats vs the IMAP account folder for my Gmail account on my Mac. However, I do not use my Gmail account for messages that have many attachments, and certainly not lots of large graphic files as attachments. I also have my online setting on the Gmail website to not present the All Mail folder, since that is not needed.

More info, please, including size info from Home/Library/Mail/the IMAP account folders in aggregate -- is this what you find to be 40 GB?

Ernie

There should not be any such difference between what is shown in the application and what is found at Home/Library/Mail for the account folders. There has to be some misunderstanding?

Ernie

The source of whatever was taking up that much space could not have been the result of a normal setup of the Gmail accounts. It was not due to to normal operation of either 10.6 or the Mail app -- thus it is not an error that can be easily replicated or fixed by Apple, since clearly it was unique to your one installation.

Ernie