A tip on macOSXHints describes how to reclaim some hard disk space by deleting email attachments in Mail.app.

If you are doing a thorough spring clean and want to reclaim as much space as possible, there are two additional things you can do:

1. If you were using Mail when you upgraded to Tiger, there may be useless files in your Mail folder that you can can safely remove.

   I cut down the size of my Mail folder by 25% doing this. The Apple technote referred to in this tip explains how to do that.

2. In Tiger Apple Mail saves a copy of some attachments in a folder called Mail Downloads in the Library folder of your Home directory. (~/Library/Mail Downloads).

   Depending on your settings (see the fifth and sixth drop-down options in Mail > Preferences > General), Mail.app may store things in there forever.

   You can reclaim a lot of space by deleting unneeded attachments in this folder as well as in the messages themselves.

Similar Posts:

• Spring Cleaning: Four ways to reclaim diskspace
• The final solution: Deleting Mail.app entirely
• What’s in your Mail folder?
• The dreaded “your home directory is full” error
• Backing up Apple Mail

Tags: Apple Mail, email attachments, Mail folder, mail.app, technote, tip

This entry was posted on Thursday, 24th November, 2005 at 8:33 am and is filed under Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.