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iPad Air 2, iOS 12.3.1 I tried to free up storage by deleting all emails from every mailbox in Apple Mail - but the result was a doubling of the storage in Mail docs & data. Why did this happen, and how can I empty docs & data?
iPad Air Wi-Fi
Hello,
Who is your email provider? After you have emptied the trash and waited a few minutes please verify that in Settings -> General -> iPad Storage that Mail’s disk space usage has decreased. About how much space is Mail consuming now?
Comcast is my email provider. It was last evening (about 14 hours ago) when I deleted all emails, including those in trash. The usage in Mail went from 744 MB to approximately twice that (I did not confirm whether it was exactly doubled). Currently the usage in Mail docs & data has come down, but is still higher (961MB) than it was before deleting all emails.
Thanks for responding. - 2sheets44
I did that last night after deleting the emails, but have just done it again - no change in Mail D & D usage.
I should confess that I understand very little about how email accounts should be managed, and I suspect that I have done things in problematic ways. For instance, I have 2 email accounts on the iPad. One is the default Comcast account which I use almost exclusively, and the other is an iCloud account (@me.com). When I erased emails last evening, I did so in all mailboxes in both accounts. I suspect the iCloud account may be a key to this puzzle.
Since my wife and I use the same email account on our Mac desktops as well as our iPads, I decided to try deleting the Apple Mail app from my iPad, reinstalling it, and then installing the same email account rather than a new one. This was simple. The result was interesting. iPad storage now shows a whole gig less usage - but Apple Mail D & D still shows 929 MB usage! And the emails present in the various Comcast mailboxes on my iPad are those currently present on my Mac. So apparently one can have one's emails and the storage they take also!
This seems too good to be true, so I will wait and see whether it holds up. And I will be interested in any comments you have. And thank you - it's a good outcome so far!
The last word - Mail Documents and Data is now down to 2.6MB, and total iPad usage is still 1GB lower than when I began this process. So the operation was totally successful and the result is no longer puzzling. Thanks again!
Hello,
This is great news! I am happy to hear all is working.
Hello,
That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. This is a very strange problem! Lets try restarting your iPad to see if that will make a difference.
Hello,
Lets try signing out of your Comcast email from Settings -> Accounts & Passwords. Restart your iPad. Once your iPad is back on add your Comcast email back.
Hello,
Please verify that you also emptied the trash folder in Mail. Other services like Gmail do not support deleting emails, instead the archive them which will still consume disk space.
Yes - I also emptied the trash folder.
I've been wondering about doing that, but I'm unsure how to go about adding it back. What info would I need to do that?
Hello,
I suggest reaching out to Comcast and asking them what mail server settings and ports to properly setup your account in Apple Mail.
Fantastic!! I am happy to hear all is working as it should.
Apple Mail storage
