iCloud trash can not empty

Hopefully someone will step forward with an answer because I am getting the same thing. According to my iPhone my iCloud Mail is using 4.5 GB storage. I've deleted all my email trying to get the number to fall but it isn't. When I looked in my Trash there was no email there but I selected Empty Trash anyway just to make sure, and that's when I got the exact message you did.

I had exactly same issue... I have been used for apple email account for long time... my strage has been reached recently. In order to the issue I could not reduce my storage. 😟

My problem was fixed. Here's some details.

I contacted Apple for help and they were immediately available and very helpful. The first person I talked to admitted that the account was showing other issues on his end and he was not sure how to correct it so he bumped it up to the next level. The second person quickly saw some bigger issues and suggested that "engineering" get involved. I was told that there should be a resolution in a day or two.

Not waiting for an email I contacted the second level guy two days later. He wanted to make sure that the iCloud account was set up and enabled (I had disabled it) in Mail on the computer. He asked me to select Mail > Mailbox > Erase Deleted Items in the iCloud account. I wasn't sure why I was doing this since the Trash was empty and storage was still showing 4.5GB for Mail, but I did as I was instructed.

After I did that I checked the storage again and it showed 3.8GB! A few minutes later it had dropped to 618KB!

I asked what they did and he indicated that apparently their servers did not pick up my request to delete soooo many emails at one time. I had selected almost all of the email to delete all at the same time.

Whether there's more to it than that I'm not sure, and I don't care. I do know that before I called them there was a problem and after I called them there is no longer a problem. The key to all of this might be the Bold part above, though.

I will say they were very quick to assign someone to me (within a minute), and very accommodating, and quick to resolve the problem.

I think the original problem stemmed from trying to delete such a huge amount of email at one time. I don't think I will do that again.

Sincere thanks for posting this. Your effort saved me a lot of time.

Dear plcmms

Thank you very much, it took some time to clean up request on server side,
Now my storage was recovered...

Thanks again

Jun

Glad I could help.

I wanted to confirm that plcmms instructions here are what solved my problem:

Not waiting for an email I contacted the second level guy two days later. He wanted to make sure that the iCloud account was set up and enabled (I had disabled it) in Mail on the computer. He asked me to select Mail > Mailbox > Erase Deleted Items in the iCloud account. I wasn't sure why I was doing this since the Trash was empty and storage was still showing 4.5GB for Mail, but I did as I was instructed.

I hadn't even used Mail on my Mac in years, but booting it up and activating my iCloud account and doing the above cleared out my old messages at last. 2GB of old messages were freed up on my iCloud account immediately after.

Thanks! This was driving me nuts!

Hi

I have exaclty the same issue, but I don't have MAC.

any idea how can i do what you are suggesting here ??

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Not waiting for an email I contacted the second level guy two days later. He wanted to make sure that the iCloud account was set up and enabled (I had disabled it) in Mail on the computer. He asked me to select Mail > Mailbox > Erase Deleted Items in the iCloud account. I wasn't sure why I was doing this since the Trash was empty and storage was still showing 4.5GB for Mail, but I did as I was instructed.

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Thanks plcmms

Your post lead me to getting this resolved. Just wanted to post an update. The path I needed to follow to delete my iCloud trash was Mailbox>Erase Deleted Items>iCloud. This is probably due to my MAC email system is a different version.

Thanks again!!

Chris

Try to remove files from ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com\~apple\~CloudDocs/.Trash/ directory