Mail attachments not deleting when mail is deleted

Question

Level 1

94 points

Mail attachments not deleting when mail is deleted

I thought I would free up some space on my main hard drive by deleting obsolete work related emails containing attachments. I have emails going back to 2017 with PDFs, JPEGs, Word files which have been copied elsewhere.

Mail Preferences allows me to have attachments deleted along with the email, but I wanted to confirm this.

I know that the attachments are stored in my user folder>Library>Containers>com.apple.mail>Data>Library>Mail Downloads, so I went there and noted that I have 1.74 GB of downloads.

I then went to Mail and deleted roughly half of the mail dated before 2019. Emptied Trash, and looked at my Mail Downloads folder. Still at 1.74GB. Restarted Mail, but no change.

iMac, OS X 10.11

Posted on Aug 24, 2020 8:05 AM

Reply

Answer 1

DaleH Author

Level 1

94 points

Aug 25, 2020 7:27 AM in response to BDAqua

I am using Catalina 10.15.6.

Dates of items in folder?

The Date Modified for the Mail Downloads folder itself is "Yesterday" so it's getting getting activity now.

The last attachment I received was yesterday and I can find it by name in the Downloads Folder.

Even though I deleted all emails dated prior to 2019, my Mail Downloads Folder still contains subfolders dated back to 2015.

Reply

Answer 2

BDAqua

Level 10

245,303 points

Aug 26, 2020 7:47 AM in response to DaleH

Good thing you called me on that, must've been looking in the wrong user's folder, indeed that is where they are...

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

75,510,379 bytes (76.7 MB on disk) for 334 items

🙈🙈🙈

Reply

Answer 3

EckartHa

Level 1

4 points

Aug 27, 2020 9:28 AM in response to DaleH

I can really not add that much of use. But this is a well know problem of Apple Mail since many, many years.

For a while I had a script that walked through the folders, checked whether spotlight had the file associated with a message, and deleted the ones which it did not. But that does not work anymore with the last iterations of Apple Mail.

You might consider removing the particular mail account from your macs list, reboot and reenter the account providned it is a IMAP account. And this procedure does not help with locally stored mail folders.

Reply

Answer 4

EckartHa

Level 1

4 points

Aug 27, 2020 10:20 AM in response to DaleH

May be I should add one note: Your experiments might not be conclusive. Provided you are running TimeMachine and your system is an APFS volume, the files you expect to be deleted may still be part of a snapshot TimeMachine had created. Hence, they are deleted from the file system you are seeing, but the space is not freed. It will be free when TimeMachine has deleted all snapshot dating back.

Reply