You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

User profile for user: satvinder_India
satvinder_India Author
User level: Level 1
4 points

Mail

I have a MacBook air with MacOs Catalina 10.15.3. Since I have 128 GB of SSD, space is a constant issue, While doing some basic analysis, i noticed my Mail is consuming apron 40 GB of space.

I have more than 2,00,000 mails across 2 accounts. To make some space I deleted apron 80,000 of my old mails from my inbox and removed from the bin, I was expecting at least 30% of 40GB to be freed up but even after deleting these mails, there was hardly any difference in available space.


Dont know what to do, I have read many forums but there is no proper answer/solution to this.


Please help.

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.12

Posted on Oct 16, 2020 3:07 AM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply
User profile for user: John Galt
John Galt
User level: Level 10
147,294 points

Posted on Oct 16, 2020 7:47 AM

That's a lot of space just for email messages. If you investigate the remaining messages, you are likely to find an abundance of attachments. That most likely accounts for most of the 40 GB.


You can easily find email messages with attachments by typing attachments in Mail's Search field. That causes a dropdown menu to appear from that field. Select Message has Attachments.


If you still can't reduce the space Mail requires, Rebuild mailboxes in Mail on Mac - Apple Support. You can rebuild any Mailbox, or all Mailboxes.


Then: Update macOS. You may need to reclaim some space before you can do that, which I surmise may be the reason for your question. macOS 10.15.3 is a few months out of date.

View in context

Similar questions

2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply
User profile for user: John Galt
John Galt
User level: Level 10
147,294 points

Oct 16, 2020 7:47 AM in response to satvinder_India

That's a lot of space just for email messages. If you investigate the remaining messages, you are likely to find an abundance of attachments. That most likely accounts for most of the 40 GB.


You can easily find email messages with attachments by typing attachments in Mail's Search field. That causes a dropdown menu to appear from that field. Select Message has Attachments.


If you still can't reduce the space Mail requires, Rebuild mailboxes in Mail on Mac - Apple Support. You can rebuild any Mailbox, or all Mailboxes.


Then: Update macOS. You may need to reclaim some space before you can do that, which I surmise may be the reason for your question. macOS 10.15.3 is a few months out of date.

Reply
User profile for user: tygb
tygb
User level: Level 9
64,764 points

Oct 16, 2020 10:08 AM in response to satvinder_India

Mail application is using 40 GB out of total Macintosh HD space that is 128 GB rest of space is used by other applications installed .

See this thread https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251789307

Note : please update your Mac OS to catalina 10.15.7 ( also download supplementary updates that appeared ) .

The applications can be removed using this article also https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/system-information/syspf5a64aa6/mac ( click on applications sections in the side bar )

Reply

Mail

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.
Learn more Sign up