Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
Dear community
I recently deleted over 10.000 mails from my mail app (believing they would not be deleted from the gmail server which was not true - now they are all gone - thank you chatGPT).
How can it be that my MacBook Air M1 still shows me that over 80gb are covered in terms of mail? How do I get rid of this data trash? I would like to have these emails on the gmail server but not on my hard drive.
Thank you in advance!
What email client?
What email protocol are you using?
Modern configuration of email uses the IMAP protocol. IMAP synchronizes all email clients and the email server with respect to email. So if you delete an email from any of the email clients accessing the email account, the deleted email is deleted across the devices accessing the same account.
You could use your email provider's webmail interface to check if they provide online storage or archiving of deleted email.
If your computer says you have 80GB of email on your computer then you have downloaded the email and have them stored locally on your computer outside the IMAP folder configuration. Where are you storing your local downloaded email? If you are using Apple Mail, did you create any "On My Mac" local email boxes/folders?
Thank you for your reply.
I use IMAP for all my mail accounts. I use the standard mail client of mac ("mail"). So, then I must assume my emails are deleted forever. Luckily, I found a few more emails in the webmail interface today and I already rescued them out of the trash but most of it is gone.
Now the other question, the data problem: I have not created any such folders on my mac. I also searched for such folders and there are none. I also searched for emails locally but can't find any. Still, my mac tells me 80 GB are used for mail.
I found a solution. All emails are stored locally under ~/Library/Mail/ with a huge folder hierarchy and its many sub folders. There I can finally free my disc space.
Over 80GB for mail despite no mail
