Over the past week I’ve been seeing that “Your startup disk is running low on space” message on my Macbook Air, so I popped open OmniDiskSweeper to find out what the big hog was. Granted, the 128GB SSD is not an endless pit of disk space, but aside from a couple of small Windows VMs, I wasn’t exactly hoarding massive files.
It turns out the biggest culprit was my Apple Mail folder, bloating out at over 11GB. I only sync two gmail accounts with Mail, my personal and Repertwa accounts, and they don’t exceed 4GB of Gmail usage together.
I discovered that the All Mail folder causes Apple Mail to download another copy of every message in my inbox, causing unnecessary disk space usage. After digging around for an answer, the solution is quite simple:
The caveat here is that if you have any mail in your “All Mail” folder that you haven’t labeled somehow else (ie. it’s not in your inbox, sent mail or with another label), you’ll not get access to it in Apple Mail. That works just fine for me, since I leave mail in my inbox until I it’s irrelevant, and then move it to All Mail. You also set up a “Keep” label/folder, and move your useful mail from the inbox to “Keep”. The benefit is that Apple Mail will only keep one version of it (in “Keep”), and won’t include duplicate copies of the sent and inboxes.
It took a while to get my Apple Mail in line with the changes, but after a few minutes, my mail folder had dropped to just 4 gigs.
This is incredible! I love having the ability to use my gmail on Mail as I am not one of those people who finds the Gmail labels workflow useful. Thank you for fixing my endless syncronization and bloated mail file!
Alex de Cordoba
Social Media & Web Consultant
http://alexdecordoba.com/