Mail taking 215 Gb of space

JanfromBerchem wrote:

• There must be some corruption in the files, I use Google mail (business) and on google my mail takes max 30 Gb; I've read in other posts that people found issues with files in the library storing one mail iwth a large attachement hundreds of time etc.

Bit.. I don't know how to locate those files or how to solve those.

what i tried:

archve all old mails (2010 till 2017) as exported mailboxes on an external drive, archived them on google

• Tried to remove attachments of mail in 2017/2018 - but the 'remove attachment' in de "Message" menu doesn't work.

• Manually search through the files the library, without success

• Use omnidisc to search for the big files, but omnidisc only shows 150Gb of files whereas the storage manager of System Information indicates that there are 430 Gb of the 500 Gb used. It does show me a 70 Gb file it labels as 'Trash' but looking into it, it's too much looking as a mail folder that is in use (it has the entire structure of the Gmail folders). Unless... Omnidisc shows me the files that are suggestions to delete, but I'd really prefer to have a vie on the 'good' files as well before deleting...

•

With all I tried yesterday, the situation with mail got worse. I only had 30 Gb free; with exporting and deleting old mail I seem to have freed up 40 Gb of space that the storage manager labels as 'documents', what il labels as 'Mail' went only up from 185 Gb tot 215 Gb...

So my question:

Does anyone have a 'process' to work though to clean things?

• Does anyone know a reliable way or tool to spot the corrupted files?

verify —From the Finder>Go>Go To Folder, copy&paste:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Logs/Mail 

I have seen anywhere from 12 GB to 342 GB of logs here. (* a new record 700GB)

You would be safe to delete all those .txt file logs.

Thank you; right... wondering what a good practice it then...

Use Gmail's online web portal or find a dedicated Gmail client written to handle its oddities.

Gmail uses Labels, not folders. The Labels are like Tags. You can assign as many Labels to a message as you wish. To translate that into IMAP, each Label is its own folder, so you can have the same message in many different folders.

When a message arrives to the Gmail server, it is assigned an Inbox Label and an All Mail Label. Apple Mail calls the All Mail Label, "Archive."

As to the Draft issue, it seems to be that every time Mail updates the draft, Gmail creates a new draft. The updates to the draft happen quite often.

Delete what is IN the Drafts mailbox.

You can do that in finder or in the mail app.

I did some further investigation and saw that it's the drafts.mbox that is so huge (190 Gb).

Gmail has a history of doing that.

Gmail is not IMAP or any other email standard. It is its own, one-off design, but tries to pretend it is IMAP so you can use it with an email client app. Trying to shoehorn it not an IMAP client doesn't work very well at all.

Do you have the Archive folder for the Gmail account? If so, how big is the All Mail label in Gmail?

Not what I was asking, and not sure what purpose it serves.

Given that, I don't know.

Goed zo, Jan. !