François Joseph de Kermadec, who posts on the O’Reilly MacDevCenter site, got quite a fright from Mail.app today:

Today, Mail went postal (hmm, do I chalk up that one as a bad pun or coincidental wording?) on me. Deleting a message would make it reappear. Moving anything would duplicate it. Corruption crept everywhere, in subtle ways. Nothing was really reproducible but nothing was totally random either. In other words, hell.

As a result, he is giving up on Mail with a mixture of anxiety and hope.

The rest of his post is an interesting tour through the innards of Mail.app’s Mail folder, weighing the good and bad things about its organisation and arguing that the app’s development has brought about too much complexity:

To me, Mail’s facade is the best of all Mac OS X applications out there. The way it thinks about mails, the way organizes them. But looking into its Mail folder just shows how it has evolved and, more importantly, how dramatically it did, with no signs of slowing down. Too much in too little time, really. For example, should a crucial application like an email client rely on the first version of system-wide frameworks (I’m thinking Spotlight here)? Should an application take it upon itself to create an SSL-capable account automatically upon first startup without turning SSL on and without giving the user a chance to stop sending the password in the clear (.Mac indeed)?

He’s not sure what client to switch to. And there’s the rub. For all its quirks, it’s hard to beat Mail.app as the most satisfying email client out there. Not least, the control it gives to users through an abundance of plugins is unparalleled.

He’ll be back.

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A poster on the macOSXHints forum wants to know how he can delete all the account information, emails and files that Mail.app uses, so that he can use Thunderbird in peace without wasting disk space.

He is told that he needs to delete the ~/Library/Mail folder. That’s the biggest disk hog, but it is not the only one.

In 10.4.x, Mail.app also sometimes stores attachments in a folder called (by default) ~/Library/Mail Downloads. You could kill that to save some space.

If you are in the mood, why not carry on and delete the Preferences file (com.apple.mail.plist) which stores all your account settings and so on. It’s in your ~/Library/Preferences folder.

For the final purge, you could delete Mail.app itself (46.8 MB) from the Applications folder. A desperately sad business.

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Inside your Mail folder (~/Library/Mail) there are many files and folders. What are they all and what does Mail.app use them for? Find out after the jump.

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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.

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There are lots of options for backing up Apple Mail.

Now a post on macOSXHints adds another, an AppleScript app that will do an incremental local or network backup of your Mail folder. It can also back up Entourage’s mail folders.

The script has a nice GUI front-end and seems to work well. It is clearly designed as a tool for sys admins to deploy over a network for the benefit of less knowledgeable end users, but is not restricted to that task.

As the poster says, it is still a work in progress, but it quickly created a local backup of my Mail Folder without any hiccups.

One cautionary note. A full backup of Mail.app includes more than the Mail folder. It also includes your Address Book and com.apple.mail.plist preference file.

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