Mail App Mac Taking Up Space
Mar 23, 2014 How to find out what's taking up the most space on your Mac's hard drive. The best way to find out what's eating up space on your Mac is to download a third party program that can analyze and break down what's using the most space. There are several tools that can do this, both in and out of the Mac App. My mac showed over 150GB in 'System Storage' and it was all grayed out so you could not clean it up from the Manage Storage screen. I deleted these log files and my System Storage went down to practically nothing. So if you are wondering what is taking up so much room in System Storage, its could easily be these logs. – Jeff Jan 29 at 18:18. May 11, 2014 Launch Mail app as usual. Note that you’ll have far fewer cached emails stored now on the device (yes, that’s the whole point), so if you scroll back in time too far more will download, slowly adding to the “Mail and Attachment” storage usage again.
Free up storage space for email accounts in Mail on Mac. Delete large messages or messages with attachments, or move the messages to a mailbox on your Mac. Tip: To quickly identify large messages, click. Delete attachments that you saved. Choose Message Remove Attachments; the.
Mail User Guide
If your email account exceeds the storage limits set by the account’s provider, you can take some actions in Mail to free up space on the account’s mail servers.
In the Mail app on your Mac, do any of the following:
Delete large messages or messages with attachments, or move the messages to a mailbox on your Mac.
Tip: To quickly identify large messages, click “Sort by” at the top of the message list, then choose Size from the pop-up menu.
Delete attachments that you saved. Choose Message > Remove Attachments; the message remains in the mailbox and Mail indicates attachments were manually removed.
For IMAP accounts, be sure to download the attachments first—attachments are deleted from the mail server and can’t be retrieved.
Empty your Trash mailbox. Messages you recently deleted are in the Trash mailbox but haven’t yet been removed from the mail server. Choose Mailbox > Erase Deleted Items, then choose to remove them from all accounts or a specific account.
The only downside about the app is that my countdowns sit above all my screens rather than just on my desktop. Full screen countdown app for mac free. I have to shut the whole app to get them off my screen so I can actually do my work or watch movies.
For POP accounts, reduce the amount of time that copies of messages and attachments remain on the mail server before being removed. Choose Mail > Preferences, click Accounts, select the account, click Advanced, then choose a different option from the pop-up menu below “Remove copy from server after retrieving a message.”
To check the size of messages and mailboxes, view account information.
So, your Mac is running out of storage. You try to figure out what’s taking up your disk space by clicking the Apple logo on the top-left of the screen, selecting About This Mac, and hitting the Storage tab.
To your surprise, you see a yellow bar representing “System” that seems to occupy way more space than you think it should. In the example above, it only shows 207 GB, but take a look at this Apple discussion — some Mac users report that System Storage takes an astonishing 250 GB.
Worse yet, you have no idea what’s included in “System” storage, because clicking the “Manage” button brings you to this System Information window… and the “System” row is greyed out.
Why does my Mac system require so much space?
What does it contain?
Is it safe to remove some of those system files?
How do I regain more storage space?
Questions like these may easily get to your head. Although my Mac now has a good amount of disk space available, I’m always wary of files that are taking up more space than they should.
I have no idea why “System” is greyed out while “Documents,” “System Junk,” “Trash,” etc. allow you to review the files based on size and type. My hunch is that Apple does this on purpose to prevent users from deleting system files that could lead to serious issues.
What Files Are Included in System Storage on Mac?
During my research, I found many people report that Apple counts iTunes backup files and app caches (e.g. Adobe video cache files) in the System category.
Since it’s greyed out and we are unable to click on that category for deeper analysis, we’ll have to use a third-party app to assist.
CleanMyMac X is perfect for this kind of analysis. Since I tested the app in our best Mac cleaner review, it immediately came to my head when I saw “System” was greyed out in Storage. Note that CleanMyMac isn’t freeware, but the new “Space Lens” feature is free to use and it allows you to scan your Macintosh HD, and then show you an in-depth overview of what’s taking up disk space on your Mac.
Step 1:Download CleanMyMac and install the app on your Mac. Open it, under “Space Lens” module, first click the yellow “Grant Access” button to allow the app to access your Mac files and then select “Scan” to get started.
Step 2: Soon it’ll show you a folder/file tree and you can hover your cursor over each block (i.e. a folder). There you can find more details. In this case, I clicked “System” folder to continue.
Step 3: The file breakdown below indicates that some Library and iOS Support files are the culprits.
The interesting part is that the System file size shown in CleanMyMac is much smaller than the size shown in System Information. This puzzles me and makes me believe that Apple definitely has counted some other files (not real system files) in the System category.
What are they? I have no clue, honestly. But as reported by other Mac users who experienced the same issue, they said Apple also considers app caches and iTunes backup files as System files.
Out of curiosity, I ran CleanMyMac again for a quick scan. That app found 13.92 GB in iTunes Junk. Further review revealed that the junk files are old iOS device backups, software updates, broken downloads, etc.
But even after adding this amount to the original system files returned by CleanMyMac X, the total size is still a bit less than what’s returned in System Information.
If cleaning the System Storage is still not enough to bring your Mac available disk space to a normal level (i.e. 20% or more), see below.
What Else Can I Do to Reclaim More Disk Space?
There are tons of ways out there. Here are a few of my favorites that should help you get back a decent amount of space quickly.
1. Sort all files by size and delete old large files.
Mac Mail App Update
Open Finder, go to Recents and look at the Size column. Click on it to sort all recent files by file size (from large to small). You’ll have a clear overview of what items are eating up a large amount of space, e.g. From 1 GB to 10 GB, and from 100 MB to 1 GB.
On my MacBook Pro, I found a few large videos that could be transferred to an external drive.
Note: If the Size column doesn’t show up, click on the Settings icon and select Arrange By > Size.
2. Remove duplicate files.
Don’t forget those duplicates and similar files! They can stack up without you being aware of it. Finding them is sometimes time-consuming. That’s what Gemini 2 is designed for. Simply select a few frequently used folders (e.g. Documents, Downloads, etc.) in the main zone of Gemini.
It then scans them and returns all the duplicate files that might be worth removing. Of course, it’s always a good practice to review them before doing so. You can also read more from our detailed Gemini review here.
Wrapping It Up
Ever since Apple introduced the Optimized Storage feature, Mac users got the option of saving space by storing content in the cloud. Apple also has several new tools that make it easy to find and remove unneeded files.
Delete Mac Mail App
That bar under the Storage tab is beautiful. It does allow you to get a quick overview of what’s taking up the most space on our hard drive. However, it still lacks insights into the “System” category as it’s greyed out.
Set Up Mail App
Hopefully, the guides above have helped you figure out the reasons you’ve got so much “System” data, and most importantly you’ve reclaimed some disk space — especially for new MacBooks pre-installed with flash storage — every gigabyte is precious!