Mail App is filling up my hard drive

Question

Mail App is filling up my hard drive

Hello everyone,

I've searched this forum and found several related problems but none of them seem to be exactly what I'm running into.

Numerous users have reported that their hard drive is filling up mysterously for various reasons.

The culprit of my problem is the Mail application.

I have it linked to 2 accounts, a gmail and a yahoo account.

About 2 weeks ago, my yahoo account bagan to fail.

It seemed like it just cannot link to the mail server, so it's constantly running.

Though I took notice of it I did not care too much because I do not use my yahoo account as primary.

Then couple days after realized there was a new mailbox called "Recovered Mail"

Inside the mailbox was a mail I had sent to my client awhile ago and I had attempted to delete the message but it would always come back!

However, since it was only one message I did not care too much.

Until couple days ago my MBP alarted me that my hard drive is reaching full capacity.

After some research, I came across an App called Disk Inventory X

It shows the sizes of all the files on your computer and displays it in a nice graph.

With the help of the app, I found that my computer had accumulated 220GB worth of files.

I immediately removed my yahoo account from the Mail app and guess what? it fixed the problem.

I guess I do not have a problem to be solved here but

I would like to share the usefulness of the app "Disk Inventory X"

and see if anyone have ran into the same problem.

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.2)

Posted on Oct 23, 2011 4:16 PM

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Answer 1

Feb 6, 2012 12:37 PM in response to allstreetball625

Exactly the same is happening to my brother-in-laws mac... He has a BT Yahoo account. It's driving him CRAZY!

I found the files by use of the hidden Library file - using 'Go To Folder' from finder and entered /Users/<account name>/Library .I then deleted the offending mail folders, but the same thing has happened again.

Anyone got a resolution - other that deleting the account??

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Answer 2

Apr 23, 2012 4:12 PM in response to hilltopcam

The solution I found is to set my IMAP accounts (in the Advanced tab) to "Don't keep copies of any messages", then set rules that copy messages to local folders. My setup is pretty complicated, but this would work even if you have just one rule that copies everything into a single local folder. This gets around the problem that the OS warns you about when you use this setting, that Spotlight will no longer be able to search for messages. Spotlight keeps building and caching redundant indexes of IMAP accounts, consuming huge amounts of hard drive space. In my case, because I have tremendous volume of incoming mail and multiple IMAP accounts, this could eat up 30GB in a single afternoon. Unless you regularly quit mail, reboot, and run something like Lion Cache Cleaner, this eventually fills up the hard drive. I'm sure Apple will fix the problem sometime in the future, but, in the meantime, this is a pretty painless work-around.

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Answer 3

V.A.P.

Level 1

16 points

Apr 24, 2012 6:04 AM in response to William Neyman

William - I have a new iMac, 10.7.3 (last week) and am just getting to know it after having used an emac for 11 years. Do you happen to know if this occurs on that version as well? Where would I check the hard drive space?

Again, the fix simply put (set rules that copy messages to local folders) would be ...?

Does Lion Cache Cleaner come on Lion, or do I need to find it somewhere else?

Thanks!

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