An obvious way to free up space on your Mac is by emptying the Trash (right-click on Trash in the dock and choose Empty Trash). You should also delete any items you're unlikely to need from the. Drag and drop the action named Run Shell Script beneath the Quit Application action. In the empty field in the middle of the Run Shell Script action, copy and paste the command below that corresponds to the version of macOS that is running on your Mac. Don't forget the semi-colon at the end of the line.
Email plays a major role in communication and online activity in general. Everyone these days has one, some even have separate email addresses for different aspects of their lives — work, personal, subscriptions, etc. With this much information channeled through multiple emails, there is a need for a convenient way of staying on top of it all. Mail application is Apple’s way of helping you manage all of your mail. Yet you have probably noticed by now, that it tends to feast on your disk space with the course of time
Where is Mail Stored on Mac?
Apple’s Mail is notorious for taking up tons of storage. In order to make your emails available offline, Mail keeps a local copy of an email as well as all of its attachments. Considering how much mail is coming in on the daily, these numbers tend to grow quickly. How to package a mac app. Before you know it — Mail can take up over 10GBs on your drive.
For the most part, this number will be composed of attachments. To check the amount of space currently taken by Mail attachments open Finder, press Shift+Command(⌘)+G and paste this directory if you are running Sierra or later versions of macOS:
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/
Photo background eraser app mac. Right click Mail Downloads folder and select Get Info to view the size of the folder.
How to Remove Attachments from Mail
It’s already been established that the majority of space taken on your Mac by Apple’s Mail is taken by attachments. There are a few ways how to handle the situation and take back the free space.
One of your options is to fully delete an attachment from the email after downloading it. It’s kind of tedious and somewhat inconvenient, as it involves fully removing an attachment after you are done with it, yet it will prevent Mail from storing excessive cache.
To fully erase attachments from an email you will first have to open the Mail app and select an email with an attachment.
After selecting an email, click on Message in the Menu bar and hit Remove Attachments. Please note, that this will fully remove the attachment not just from your computer, but also from the email server.
Note: You can also create a Smart Mailbox from within the Mail app. By choosing Contains attachments filter you will easily collect all mail with an attachment of any sort. This allows for bulk selection (hold command(⌘)+click to select multiple).
How to Clean Mail on Mac Without Losing Attachments
The second option is to manually clean out attachment cache. This will remove the files locally stored by the Mail app and free up space on your Mac. “But will I lose my attachments?” — Not at all. This method takes quite a bit of extra effort, but when executed correctly, you do not lose anything.
Open Finder and press Shift+Command(⌘)+G, copy and paste the directory:
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads
This will take you straight to the folder where your attachments are cached. Select all files and move them to Trash. Note, this will not remove your attachments from the email server, which mean the next time you open an attachment it will automatically be cached again.
Optimize & Scan Email Attachments Using an App
Your final option involves deleting attachment caches on Mac by means of third-party applications. This method proves to be the fastest and safest if you are dealing with a large number of attachments synced through Apple Mail.
MacFly Pro is a reliable app capable of safely removing attachments. It knows exactly where to look for all sorts of cached email data in OSX. It also allows to view and choose the files you want to remove.
Download and install MacFly Pro, then select Mail Attachments and hit Scan. Once it’s done scanning, simply select what you want to remove and hit Delete Selected.
How to Prevent Mail from Littering Your Disk
Now that you are done with cleaning out your attachments you can prevent Apple’s Mail app from downloading and storing such an obnoxious number of data. Bring up Mail>Preferences and switch to Accounts tab. Under the Download Attachments setting pick Recent or None, depending on what you want Mail to keep.
The bottom line is that Mail can be quite troublesome to manage at first, yet it remains one of the top free apps to use with multiple email addresses. Dedicated Mac utilities can help a great deal when clearing out cached attachments. However, if that still is too much of a hassle, you can ditch Mail altogether and switch to a different app.
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10.7: Mac Mail - Get the Outbox back | 12 comments | Create New Account
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Surely the Outbox is a vestige from days when people weren't connected to the Internet all the time. Messages would sit there until you connected to the internet, and then they would be sent.These days, messages are sent as soon as you .. err.. send them, so there's no longer a need for this limbo.
'Many of us are very particular about email delivery and want to know if we have messages waiting to go out.'
Isn't it more likely that many people assume their message has been sent, unless the Outbox appears?
Some people travel a lot, and find that the internet is actually not always available everywhere. In fact, it turns out that there are quite a lot of places where it's not. Furthermore, some people have things like corporate email servers which require them to be connected to a VPN to send email when offsite, which they are often not, whether because of lack of an internet connection or other issues. The problem is compounded by the fact that when you are frequently offline, Mail seems to do a somewhat bad job at actually sending things when you do come back online. Or so one might suspect, but it's hard to verify and even harder to report bugs when the outbox isn't visible to _show_ that you've got waiting outbound messages.
There's also the case where you're using Mac Mail to access an Exchange server and your Exchange presence is down (this is the problem I had yesterday which left me looking for an Outbox to verify delivery.. or the lack thereof.. and is what prompted my solution.. yes, I'm the author of the hint). In this case, I had full internet connectivity, but the mail server was having problems and I needed to see the contents of the Outbox to know when things were working again, etc.
How To Clean Up Mail App On Mac Not Sending Emails
I have a corporate account that used to be like this in the old days. No VPN, no mail going out or coming. With time the corp IT changed and now we do not suffer the 'Outbox' issue.
The only times I really want to check my Outbox is when the mail does not go and that happens when there are problems and Mail shows me the box. It is a nice to have option to show the outbox. I believe that Mail should have a setting to enable or disable it.
Rather than creating the bogus SMTP server couldn't I just take my Mac offline (turn off Airport and/or ethernet) and try to send an email using an existing server in order to get the Outbox to show? (I would try this myself but I already tried your hint and haven't figured how to remove the Outbox icon yet.)
I was able to do this more simply by: disconnect from broadband, send e-mail to self, Outbox appears and can be dragged into Favourites bar.
Remember to reconnect! Clean Up Mac Computer
I didn't have to set a bogus smtp server, just turn of Airport (WiFi) on your computer or disconnect any ethernet cable or turn off any other way that you use to connect to internet. Send an email and automatically it will be sent to the Outbox that will appear, then just move it to the favorites bar.
It's a lot easier this way. Thank you for the tip.
No, thank you.
How To Clean Up Mail App On Macbook
This is not working for me. I get the message that the server is offline, but no offer to send it later and no appearance of an Out mailbox.
I am returning to report that this morning the Outbox appeared when I opened the mail app. So I too now have one permanently!
Nice tip, thanks!
Great tip, extremely helpful.
Outbound mail seems to be a bit unreliable, so it's great to be easily able to see if there is anything stuck in the outbox. Comments are closed.
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