Removing recovered mail on my mac

Worked perfectly. Many thanks.

Wish the title better reflected the range of issues this fixes as it took a long time to find this solution.

My wife's MacBook Mail program was showing a continuously spinning globe in the Inbox and had stopped receiving new emails. In addition the next day, she began getting the 'Your startup disc' has too little memory messages.

Searching under both of those issues did not lead to any solution and certainly not this solution. It was only after I recognized that the hard drive was filling with repeated copies of the same recovered message that a search led us here.

The easiest way to do this (credit to Harmen Utrecht) is as follows:

Problem: Mac Mail keeps recovering same messages over and over again.

Easy Solution:

Go to Mail Preferences.

Select the mail account involved.

Go to tab Advanced.

Under "Keep copies of messages for offline viewing" select "Don't keep copies of any messages".

(Don't worry, they are still on the server.)

Close Preferences.

If needed: Delete the problem messages from the Recovered Message folder.

Close Mail.

Problem fixed.

If you want, go back into Mail Preferences and reset the choice back to the old "Keep messages for offline viewing".

Then, everything will be back the way it was, but the problem messages won't come back.

So far this has helped! Thank you!! So will this delete all the Recovered Messages that were saved on my MacBook Pro? I don't want them to take up my space!! Thanks!

I did the following above and it did not work for me. I eventually went into my Google Account through Google (not through my Mac Accounts) and deleted the large file there. I then removed my email account through Mac/System Preferences and then set it up again. The large files were gone.

Thanks so much WM!!!! It finally worked!!!!! Thanks so much.

I tried this process, and so far it seem to have worked. I have not set my messages back to the original format yet. But Thanks Wm!

Thanks, Mate. It is working!

Wm*, Awesome stuff mate. Your way worked for me.

Thanks ever so much.

Brilliant!

Looked at the "reveal invisible files" method but it seemed much more complicated. This worked a treat!

Thanks!

This doesnt work, I dont have the "keep copies of messages for offline viewing" caption under Mail Preferences.