Mail.app shows large emails; no attachments

Question

Mail.app shows large emails; no attachments

So I decided to backup my Gmail account by starting up Mail for the first time and syncing. I would like to archive all my emails and attachments so I can delete my Gmail account.

After about an hour when it was all done syncing up I noticed that some large emails (8-30mb) had no attachment icon or any files visible at all. I know for a fact that those emails indeed should have files because my Gmail account displays them without issue. The text in the emails is unaffected.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), Late 2006 15in 2.16ghz

Posted on Mar 1, 2012 2:57 AM

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Answer 1

Mar 1, 2012 4:09 AM in response to Chase McKenzie

Have you activated the Conversation display in Gmail (on the webmail, I mean)? If so, the full-size email you're seing could be whole conversations bundled together with the attachments.

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Answer 2

Mar 1, 2012 4:22 AM in response to FrenchToast

The conversation view is set to on, and I believe that it's always been set that way since I got a Gmail account back in 2006. So are you saying that when I view my Gmail account from within Mail.app the large messages without attachments are just part of the conversation and that the attachments are only present in the original message? If that's the case, does that mean that the message in Mail.app is not actually the size it says and is only referring to the first message's size? That doesn't quite add up because my Gmail (web) says that my account has used up 2.6gb of space while Mail.app has accumulated 14.69gb after syncing! However when I selected 'Archive Mailbox' in Mail.app the folder it created was 4.31gb. Something isn't adding up!

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