Can I Limit How Far Back Mail Retrieves Gmail Messages?

Question

Level 1

11 points

Can I Limit How Far Back Mail Retrieves Gmail Messages?

Hello,

I'm wondering if there's a way to limit how far back Mail retrieves Gmail messages? I would like to keep just the last 6 months of messages on my MacBook but when I sync my account, it syncs all 6 years (and about 7GB) worth of messages. I can't seem to find an option to only retrieve messages 6 months old or newer. Is there such an option somewhere?

Thanks!

MacBook Air 13.3", Mac OS X (10.6.6)

Posted on Mar 3, 2011 8:14 AM

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Answer 1

ajduguid

Level 3

650 points

Mar 3, 2011 9:24 AM in response to cjsomar84

I think it's a symptom of gmails weird system of keeping all emails in the inbox, something that doesn't work very well if you access it via IMAP. Try moving all the older emails into a folder, assuming gmail lets you do such a thing. I don't mean tagging them by the way.

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Answer 2

Mar 3, 2011 10:03 AM in response to cjsomar84

I just discovered that you can have advanced controls of your Gmail IMAP account that will reflect in Apple Mail.
- Log in to your Gmail via a browser and using Google gmail. You can actually Google "Google gmail" and use that link.
- Go to Settings / then LABS and Enable "Advanced IMAP controls".
- Go to FORWARDING AND POP/IMAP and go to "Folder Size Limits'

I hope this helps.

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Answer 3

cjsomar84 Author

Level 1

11 points

Mar 4, 2011 6:08 AM in response to SilverCloud

Tried this and it worked - thanks for the tip! I also found out that Thunderbird has native support for this type of thing, but I prefer Mail's UI so I'll go back to using it now.

Thanks!

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Answer 4

DavoteK

Level 1

0 points

Oct 29, 2011 9:55 AM in response to SilverCloud

Cheers Silvercloud, just got an iMac and set up my Gmail account and ended up with 30,000 messages in my inbox, lol

Great tip, was looking in Mail to sort it, didn't think about looking in the Gmail native settings.

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Answer 5

Nov 18, 2012 11:57 AM in response to SilverCloud

THANK YOU, This did the trick - and now it's no longer under Labs, but right there in the Forwarding POP and IMAP tab under the IMAP settings.

Gmail > Settings (gear icon on the right) > Forwarding POP/IMAP tab > IMAP Access > Folder Size Limits > Limit IMAP folders to contain no more than this many messages XXXX messages

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