imap Apple Mail account Using too much room on disk

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imap Apple Mail account Using too much room on disk

Can anyone explain why the gmail server says I'm using 4.22gb of server space, but my computer that has this email account imap-ed is using about 360gb?

I'm using a El Capitan on a mid 2014 15" Macbook Pro.

(I need El Capitan for business reasons)

Is there a way to delete superfluous data without losing the messages?

Would it clean anything if I deleted the email account from my Apple Mail, and then re-imap-ed it?

I'm running out of space on my disk.

MacBook Pro 15″, OS X 10.11

Posted on Mar 25, 2023 03:13 PM

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Answer 1

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Mug Author

Level 1

19 points

Mar 27, 2023 09:25 PM in response to Mug

Turns out, talking to Apple support, it was OK to delete the imap.gmail... files deep in the libraries that were taking up 370+Gb of space. Was explained to me that these are files created by gmail that have directions of where they are guessing each email message is to go. Once done, they are junk. Elminating them doesn't effect the gmail messages or downloads.

Suddenly got 3/4 of my hard disk space back.

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