Do you own a Macbook Pro or Macbook Air from a few years ago? You may then notice a rapid decrease in hard drive free space, mainly because the hard drive sizes of these Macs are relatively small. Now, if you take a close look at your Mac’s hard drive, alongside the usual suspects (like your music or photo library), you’ll notice that the Mail app can take up a lot of space as you use it. Mac for only a year.
Hot Tip: There are several tools to check the space on your Mac’s hard drive. For example, in this other entry, let’s take a look at Daisy Disk.
If your Mac is experiencing this issue, read along to learn how to get rid of unnecessary Mail attachments and reclaim precious hard drive space.
Start.
1. Delete individual and group attachments
Most of the space that Mail takes up is due to the size of the message attachments that Mail downloads and stores for offline access by default. However, Mail also allows you to remove attachments from both individuals or groups of messages.
Important Note: Be aware though, that if you use this option, attachments that you delete will also be deleted from your email service’s servers, as both Messages are received. And sends data to the IMAP server every time it connects.
To do this, select any message or group of messages on Mail and on the menu bar, click Message. Then, from the available options, select Delete attachments and you’re done.
As mentioned above, since your attachments are also deleted from the server, this method is not recommended at all. However, if you follow our next tip, you can use it effectively.
2. Group messages with attachments
But let’s say you don’t want to remove all your attachments, but only want to remove some of them. Well, you can use one of OS X’s neatest features for this: Smart Folders.
Start by clicking + sign at the bottom left of the Mail window and select New smart mailbox.
Leave the box as it is except for the only rule: Contains attachments. Alternatively, you can also check both boxes below to make sure to include messages from both the Trash folder and the Sent folder.
Next, click ALRIGHT and a new smart mailbox will be created and will start adding messages immediately. Once all of your messages have your attachments there, you’ll be free to review each message and decide which attachments are worth saving and which aren’t.
3. Backup and delete attachments directly from your Mac’s hard drive
This approach certainly requires more work, but it gives better results and (most importantly) your attachments won’t be deleted from your mail server.
Start with your direction Library folder (in this post we show you how). There, look for Letters folder and open it.
Inside you will find another folder most likely named something like V2. Open that is fine. You will then see one or more folders depending on how many email accounts you have in Mail. These folders will be prefixed with IMAP or POP, followed by your email address and other information. Locate the email account you want to clean up and open its folder.
Inside you will find other folders. Here, look for folders that contain a folder inside named with different random characters.
In this folder you will find another folder named Dataand within that, there will be a bunch of numbered folders with different subfolders of their own.
Now here’s the tip. Instead of reviewing each one manually, enter the word Attachments in the search bar of the Finder window. When you do, choose Data instead of This Mac as your filter, sort the results by Type and the window will show all the folders with attachments in that section of your email account.
Now take some time to back up those attachments. Once done, you can safely delete them and repeat the process for a few other folders/accounts you may have.
There are two advantages to this method: first, it not only allows you to create backup copies of your attachments, but it can also do so by separating each email account, which is great for organizational purpose. Second, this method won’t damage attachments on your email server. So the next time you find a message with no attachments on Mail and click on it, Mail will just re-download its attachments.
After deleting all those Attachments folders, you will be surprised at how much space (full GB in most cases) you can get back on your hard drive. Enjoy your extra free space!
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
