I have recently moved my domain from a pop account to a gmail hosted domain, and my employer has us using gmail. I have made IMAP accounts to get my gmail content in Apple Mail. After a couple of months, my available disk space has gone from 30G to 5, without noteworthy additions of applications or files. It's all mail. Is a gmail account a disk hog? If so, are there ways of containing it?
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6)
GMail (free) gives you 7G of storage, if your GMail account is full then you'll use 7G plus a small amount of overhead, you seem to be saying that the decrease is 25G which does not add up.
When did you last empty the trash?
I went to see which gmail account is causing the disk usage, and it's my personal one. Initiated about 4 months ago, and it consumes about 45G is hard disk space. I don't get that much mail and delete a lot. The same email address was previously a POP account elsewhere and never grew anywhere near this size.
I do notice that despite my deletion and emptying of trash, there are deleted messages that won't go away. I delete, flush, and within a few hours, they're back again. The out of control growth might be the failure to delete, or it might be something else related to gmail's version of IMAP.
Gmail never deletes from a client, go to your Gmail account on the web and empty the trash from there.
Yes, I figured out that deletion was only local, which then restored from the server. I have to delete deleted on the server first. What little was waiting to be deleted on the gmail server doesn't explain the many gigs problem, though.
I was trying to delete messages and folders from the finder and made a mess of things, so I have to restore the mail from back to try cleaning out again. Still can't figure out where or why the disk space is being eaten up.
Open Console in Applications>Utilities, see if you're getting recurring messages, log files can eat up the whole Disk.
thanks for the suggestion. I use CleanMyMac to nuke all those bloated log files, so I can rule that out.
I nuked a stack of 'deleted' messages directly from the finder after the 'empty all...' command didn't do its job. That triggered a mail re-import, which seems to be a 24-40 hour process.
I gave up and deleted the Apple Mail account, which deleted all the files in the in box. I got 70G of disk space back. I recreated the account, which pulled all the files from gmail to my local machine. It's still creating caches and synching, but it looks like I've gotten my disk space back, as I have all the files and about 70G of space.
Now, to figure out what about gmail makes this disk usage creep up, and to get rid of the "all mail" folder.
I think I've got my arms around this problem. I've actually recovered about 65G of disk space in the process.
Google's version of IMAP combined with Apple Mail is a chatty, noisy, wasteful system. Google creates many folders that replicate a message (or are pointers to the same message). When Apple Mail syncs with Gmail, those folders are created on your hard drive and have actual copies (not pointers) of the messages. Caches are also spawned and the whole bloated mess is constantly syncing and spawning more temp, cache, and envelope files.
A solution is to go into gmail (on the web) look at settings, and then under the Label tab, turn off IMAP syncing with all those extra directories (like All Mail) Just turn them off.
There are two benefits:
It won't expand out of control on your hard drive (1 have .5G on gmail which bloated to 65G on my hard drive)
The constant synching and passing back and forth of files for these various folders will be choked off and you won't risk getting cut off for excessive bandwidth usage.
RADumas wrote:
I gave up and deleted the Apple Mail account, which deleted all the files in the in box. I got 70G of disk space back. I recreated the account, which pulled all the files from gmail to my local machine. It's still creating caches and synching, but it looks like I've gotten my disk space back, as I have all the files and about 70G of space.
Now, to figure out what about gmail makes this disk usage creep up, and to get rid of the "all mail" folder.
You can turn display of the 'All Mail'folder off in your Gmail account on the web: Go to Mail Settings (in the webmail interface) select 'Labels' and on that page you show or hide any folder you like, it's a good idea to hide 'All Mail' as it confuses many.
🙂
And then I read this post, and you are ahead of me. 🙂
I think the relevant GMail settings might have changed. Do you have a recommendation how to do it now? Otherwise this was super-useful, as if you upgraded my mac for hundreds of dollars. Thanks!
Also, I wonder if we could flag it somehow for Apple developers. I lose just as much disk space, if not more, with Mail 6.0, new under Mountain Lion. Whatever the hate is between Google and Apple, or however weird GMail labels are from an IMAP-folders perspective, I am surprised that Apple would be OK with their customers losing dozens of GBs of disk space because of it. This must be the case for many millions of customers.
I would expect some serious help here. Any Apple employee listening?
My mistake, it is under the label tab in GMail settings. Excellent! Thanks and sorry.
Does a gmail account use a lot of disk space?
