Email using too much memory

I'm having the same problem - 4.5 GB used for mail. Did you find a solution?

If you don't mind losing you email

delete you email account and then

readd the email account....this worked for me.

Hi folks,

another victim of the email mountain: 664 MB and growing.

Storage/RAM 1.4 GB available, 4.8 GB used.

As soon as availability goes down around 1 GB all processing becomes sluggish and erratic so I am keen to stay over 1 GB however, still the MAIL usage is by far the greatest usurper.

Using 4 pop3 accounts and 2 IMAP accounts on the iPhone 4.

Culling and deleting pop3 emails each day, deleting them when necessary and having the PC as final donwloadstation. So no pop3 emails on server left and just a 20 or so on the iPhone for reference on the way.

No attachments kept on the phone either.

No Camera Roll.

Syncing 2 IMAP accounts with a PC; measured on the PC the accounts total 20MB and synced/copied on the phone

Most account and folders on the iPhone show "No Mail".

Trash folders all deleted.

I am at a loss how to get this usage figure down and why it is showing unrealistically high. I coukld not using approximations calculate it be over 100 MB tops considering the above.

In spite of culling emails and deleteing and watching all folders its tendency is towards 700 MB now.

Of course I have backups and could consider RESET ALL CONTENT AND SETTINGS the iPhone BUT - not knowing why this behaviour exists makes resetting a silly exercise, given the effort to set the phone up again as ususual.

Will RESTORE re-create my iPhone as it was, content and settings?

Anyone?

Maria

Just delete your email accounts and reinstall them. It works.

Don

... and then again in 2 months Don? That's the time it took for the above traffic to have the usage grow to 700 MB. Not very practical my friend - might as well suggest to buy a new phone.

Not knowing its cause?

Look something is hiding or accrueing in there since while I write there's 60 emails on the iPhone, still showing 663 MB.

DiskAid can access every part of the iPhone but for Mail for some reason so what's hiding in there?

So tell me now - I back up this phone each day completely on iTunes.

After deleting as you suggest my 8 email accounts and settings - will RESTORE give me back my accounts, settings, passwords and content? Hope so!

I am a 19-year Pro with Windows, a Newbie on Apple IOS.

Tell me please?

Thanks

Maria

My email memory use is up to 3.9GB on iPhone 4S iOS 7. I keep a pile of mails from 2 accounts (backlog) with attachments, so I let it go until it crossed 3GB. After reading this thread I got it: bug. I can not use my Powerbook (OSX4.11) to make a backup. I can not expand my iCloud account because of country/credit card cross-up. I would save my mails to iCloud, but I can't see that its possible to save only my mail. This is messy. A rare screw-up by Apple who seems to have been too busy for the past 9 months to deal with it.

ok, so this happened to me and this is what i did. By the way before I get there, in response to the earlier post, if you go into your icloud settings (settings - general -usage) as far as I recall you can switch on/off what you want so emails only into icloud should be fine.

Anyway I had 2gb of memory being taken up by email on my 16gb iphone 5. First off I went to the Apple store - I have to say the staff were brimming with enthusiasm but the girl I spoke to ....well it was like she had never seen an iphone (thought they were supposed to have lots of training before being let loose???). She told me the usage page was not memory but was internet usage!!! I took her though the pages of the phone to prove to her she was wrong. She then asked me if I had googled the problem (nothing like sending customers to the competition). Lastly her solution was to suggest a back up and full factory reset but she admitted she had no idea of this would work. Seriously I wouldnt even employ her to wipe my .......

Anyway, onward ...........

So looking at a variety of pages on the internet I worked it out and it may or may not work for you but hopefully it does. By the way I have iphone and Windows laptop with pop3 mail account. I downloaded all mails up to date to the laptop (you could back up to cloud as well I suppose?).

I then deleted the mail account on my phone, firstly checking that I had all my log in /server details to hand to be able to recreate it. I often makes notes on the phone and save them as drafts. You need a copy of those too as they will disappear!

Once you hit delete there is no going back. The phone then froze for about 4-6 minutes - I guess while the 2gb was being dumped. I then switched off then on (you don't need to do that but I wanted as clean a dump as possible).

I then checked the memory - hey presto I now have a further 2gb memory.

I then set my mail account back up - downloaded a few incoming emails (including a few old ones??) and everything is now working fine.

But this is temporary as the deleted emails have already taken up 100mb or so of memory. it took me a year to fill up the 2gb and I get about 125-150 emails a day so it depends on your usage.

In a years time or so I will have to re run the process but it took me less than ten mins start to finish. 9 mins 35 to be precise 🙂

Thanks for the totally clear description — with nice story of the hired un-help. I did exactly the same thing as you outlined. Voila, 3.8GB space available (2.5 yrs of growing empty storage). As I said I am following an email series that has medium sized PDF attachments of +/-1MB each. I had to put them back by emailing them to myself. My mail storage is now 156MB with 39 of those emails. I'll see how fast it grows.

I may be missing something but I could not get only my emails onto iCloud. It appears to work only for an iCloud mail address/account.

What is the deal with a bug like this? It appears to be on only some devices, and I'll bet its a conflict with a related setting. But it is unusual that or of try iOS updates wouldn't have dealt with it. On my 4S, running the latest update, a second mail account I have had for 1.5 years does not have memory bloat! Although they are served by the same ISP account and are using the same domain, it may not be an Apple issue, but a setting conflict or a conflict with in the email server with how it registers received mail or it's deletion.

Well I have iphone 5 (not 5s) - I didn't realise the issue was model dependent - as you say its probably a conflict somewhere. This prompted me to check my ipad 2 as we have two email accounts there (me and my wife) - and hey presto the email is hogging a whopping great 3.1GB on a 64GB machine (ie 5%)

How do we get Apple to solve it?? - well either hope they read this (unlikely I guess) or hope a developer is reading and he can flag it up tp Apple?

Smee

U Can delete your email account on your iPhone and then add it back in. This will free up your memory

for a while until maybe Apple does something. Don

Yes but I already explained that to everyone didn't I?

After deleting the one account that got the bloated memory, the syncing functionality is way different; ie. it did not really do anything but download to the iPhone, and those both iPhone and computer got no feedback. Now my iPhone is functioning directly with my ISP email (downloaded, read amd flagged mail to my iPhone is reflected on the web page and partially on my computer). So, others with more expertise may know better, but it is likely that data from the ISP mail site was getting counted only in partially which somehow added up memory bloat. Since others have the same issue, it's likely always the same data stream.

For me deleting all email accounts, adding them back and deleting them again did not help reclaim the wasted memory.

My Mail app usage is still 1.2 GB.

I don't know what to do now.

Killing the mailboxes did not work.

The only way I found was to save the devices (Ipad2 and Iphone4S) on my computer, then restore the devices to factory parameters, then restore the devices from my computer. the size of the mail boxes, which reached up to 8 GO went back to 83 MO...

Thank you! I had backup then restore too. Mine was at 2.7G and is now at 343mb.