Mail cannot save information about your mailboxes because there isn't enough space in your home folder

Mail will not open since Catalina upgrade. Receive this message and I have tried all the older solutions with previous Mail OS update issues. This message pops up when attempting to import mail messages. "Mail cannot save information about your mailboxes because there isn't enough space in your home folder". Same message when I attempted the index fix from past. What is the current fix for this?

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Oct 8, 2019 9:49 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jan 4, 2020 6:32 AM

Just a reminder / summary to all with this problem:


  • It is not a mail problem. It is an issue with a corrupt Fusion drive / APFS volume and therefore can impact any app.
  • The problem is apparently caused by the data migration process that happens during the Catalina upgrade, and can apparently also be triggered by running Migration Assistant.
  • Doing a complete Catalina fresh installation including resetting the Fusion drive (and avoiding running Migration Assistant) has apparently completely resolved the issue for everyone who was tried it, myself included.


Specifically these instructions:


Alright, these steps fixed my problems:

  1. Create bootable USB with macOS 10.15.1 (or latest)
  2. Restart Mac and press with Cmd + Option + R to start recovery mode
  3. In recovery mode open Terminal and enter "diskutil resetfusion"
  4. Install macOS


151 replies

Nov 12, 2019 6:23 AM in response to NikkolaPD

As suggested (NikkolaPD Nov 12) here are more details of my iMac installationin




My iMac is 


iMac (27 inch, Late 2013)


MacOS Catalina 10.15.1 


Processor 3,5 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7


Memory 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR 


Startup disk Fusion disk consisting of 480GB SSD, 120GB Flash.    APFS formatted.




The original Fusion disk (rotating + flash) was substituted for SSD+Flash fusion by Humac Danmark (Apple Danmark) a couple of years ago.  


It was running High Sierra up to a couple of weeks ago. I had to clean install Catalina in order to upgrade.  




Catalina 10.15.1 was clean installed on the fusion disk via a bootable USB stick.


(Bootable USB stick created, Boot from USB stick, Erase and reformat with APFS the Macintosh HD volume, rebuild as Fusion volume, Migration assistant to restore sw from a Time machine backup). (see https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8551587 )




I tried the fix posted by clivesey 10th Oct 2019 1:03AM but still have the same mail problem. I have also tried clearing out all my mails in all my accounts (iCloud mail; gmail, hotmail) and applying the fix again. Still same problem. I have lots of space on my mac ( 64GB available of a 600GB SSD/flash 'fusion' drive) and am using iCloud storage where I also have tons of available space (1,8TB available!). Hope there comes a Catalina fix soon addressing this problem.

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Mail cannot save information about your mailboxes because there isn't enough space in your home folder

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