Apple Mail and Gmail Do not limit the number of messages in an IMAP folder

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Level 1

8 points

Apple Mail and Gmail Do not limit the number of messages in an IMAP folder

Hi All,

I have a very large work email account with Google Apps (Gmail). Its 67.5 GB of emails.

It used to be all you had to do was add the account and Apple Mail would download all of the emails and would then sync going forward as necessary.

Now Apple Mail is trying to download all of the emails from scratch and its causing Google to throttle the account (they throttle over 2.5 GB of transfer).

In looking at the Apple Mail logs it appears that once the throttle limit is hit, Apple Mail continues to attempt to download all of the remaining emails over and over again. As a result, Google just sees this as continued requests and never releases the throttle.

This didn't used to happen to my accounts. Further, even if this was acting as normal, it would take over 3 weeks just to download my full Imap account at 2.5 GB per day.

Shouldn't Apple Mail just be downloading the headers and messages at first and then downloading the rest of the messages (like attachments) only after having downloaded all of the text or when the email is opened manually?

Can anyone help? I am stuck using Gmail on the web as a result.

Thanks.

Posted on Jul 28, 2020 9:51 AM

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Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

123,038 points

Jul 28, 2020 1:41 PM in response to jgoodm

Mail downloads the entire message. Always has.

One thing that has changed about High Sierra/Mojave era is that the All Mail label is mapped to the Archive folder. Gmail stores every message every received or sent into the All Mail label, even if you delete the messages.

So, it may be downloading a lot of things you don't necessarily want to see in Mail. You may be able to turn off the All Mail label in IMAP clients, but another poster here tells me that new Gmail accounts do not support that feature. It would be in the Labels settings in Gmail (you have to go to Advanced or something like that).

I am stuck using Gmail on the web as a result.

That may be for the best. Gmail isn't POP or IMAP, though it pretends to be. It is a beast of their own making and trying to shoehorn it into an IMAP email client will never work sufficiently.

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Apple Mail and Gmail Do not limit the number of messages in an IMAP folder

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