Hi, I’ve just checked my “Mail downloads” folder and found that I have over 20 GB of mail attachments. While I need to keep many of the emails, I don’t need to keep the attachments as I saved what I needed in relevant folders.
Please can someone advise me: Can I just delete everything in the “Mail downloads” folder, gain 20 GB, without any unforeseen problems?
Thank you.
Hi BDAqua, thanks for responding. I use Time Machine and also Carbon Copy Cloner. What kinds of problems do you anticipate? Maybe I should email myself a new attachment, then delete the attachment from the mail downloads folder, restart, and see if the email will still open even though the attachment has been deleted?
I don't foresee any problems, but a good idea for a test on your part.
Oh wait, there was a problem just a few days ago where deleting the attachments in Mail deleted the eMails also, jus for some eMails in my tests, but the other person lost all eMails that attachments were deleted from!
Have you tried to use the "Remove Attachments" functionality under the Message menu? You can select multiple emails, meaning you could select a whole folder of emails if you so choose, and if any of those emails contains an attachment the "Remove Attachments" won't be grayed out.
Hi, finally I’ve found some time to experiment. Deleting files from the “Mail Downloads” folder does not seem to work. The attachments are still showing attached to the emails, and after opening the emails, the attachments reappear again in the “Mail Downloads” folder. It seem like the only way to delete attachments is to go through folders one by one, click on the paperclip icon to group all those with attachments, and then go to Message > Remove Attachments for all those I want to delete. Generally this is working but it seems extremely longwinded and two problems seem to be emerging: (1) Some emails with attachments show “Remove attachments “ in grey scale (in other words, cannot click on “Remove attachments”); quite a few emails with attachments are not showing they have attachments via a paperclip icon. Surprised that Apple have not already created an efficient way of bulk-deleting old email attachments (or simply giving the option to download attachments from new emails WITHOUT keeping the attachment in Mail and the Mail attachments folder).
Also, it remains to be seen whether or not "Remove attachments" actually deletes the attachments from the "Mail attachments" folder, or if it just deletes the attachment access from Mail but keeps the files in the folders...
I'd test it, drag that folder to the Trash, but do not Empty the Trash, restart... any problem?
Do you have a good Backup in case?
That is the item that removed whole eMails along with the attachments on just some of the eMails.
Sorry, it wasn’t clear to me that this was what you had meant. Thanks for letting us know that this functionality is flaky.
No problem, figured you'd want to know, still haven't figured out how or why it chooses to delete some eMails. :(
Thanks, keep up the testing! :)
Deleting Mail attachments
