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.mail.app, apple mail, plugins, mail folder, unhappy users, switchingSimilar Posts:

• Three ways to set or switch your default mail client
• Switchin’, bitchin’, pitchin’ and ditchin’
• New PowerMail beta: Fully Universal, faster
• Mail Badger 0.2: Extra smart badges for Mail
• Setting the default email client in OS X

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.mail.app, apple mail, deleting, mail folder, attachments, preferences Similar Posts:

• Spring Cleaning: Four ways to reclaim diskspace
• Reclaiming disk space from Apple Mail
• Slim down your Gmail Inbox
• What’s in your Mail folder?
• Leaner Mail Folders

Bundles folder: This is where classic plug-ins store their bundles. When you double-click on the installer for MailAppetizer or Mail Act-on, this is where the file is installed.

I have an extra folder here for feral bundles like MailPictures that don’t play nicely with other plug-ins, but which I like to be able to swap in and out sometimes. You might not.

DefaultCounts is just an XML file , listing the number of messages that the Junk filter has marked as spam and the number of messages that you have manually marked as spam.

Envelope Index is a SQLite database that keeps track of the senders, subjects and dates (but not the full text) of all your emails to allow for faster searching than Spotlight can achieve.

Scott Morrison, the developer of MailTags and Mail Act-on, has written some notes on how searching works in Mail.app in the comments on a macOSXHints article.

Deleting this file and allowing Apple Mail to rebuild it can fix a number of odd problems including the infamous “Your Home folder is full” message.

IMAP-???? Or POP-????@blahblah.com folders: Each IMAP or POP account has its own folder.

Mailboxes (mbox for POP accounts, imapbox for IMAP accounts) are stored here, with each one containing another folder, Messages, for messages and an Info.plist file to record the display setting for that particular mailbox.

You can read about the different emlx files Mail.app uses in another entry.

LSMMap2: This file is the Junk filter’s database of good and bad words and characteristics which it uses to determine whether an email is junk.

Mac-??????? is your dotmac account if you have one.

Mailboxes are all the mailboxes stored locally (the “On my Mac” option in the new mailbox dialog box). They have the same structure as the IMAP- and POP- mailboxes above.

MessageRules.plist and MessageSorting.plist are XML files that record your rules. At one stage I thought the difference between them was that the former recorded rules that didn’t move messages and the latter rules that moved emails from the Inbox to somewhere else. But that’s not right. If anyone works out the difference, I’d be glad to know.

Update: In fact, MessageRules.plist is Tiger Mail’s list of rules and MessageSorting.plist was the file used by Panther. If you have upgraded to 10.4, you can safely delete MessageSorting.plist. (Thanks, Michael and Andreas!)

OpenedAttachments.plist is a list of attachments in emails that you have opened. These are also the attachments that Mail.app stores in the ~/Library/Mail Downloads folder. These attachments can often be removed from the Mail Downloads folder to reclaim space from Apple Mail.

The Signatues folder contains a webarchive file for each signature you have created. Editing these directly is one of the ways to create HTML signatures in Mail.app. The SignaturesByAccount.plist file in this folder simply records which signatures you have alloted to which accounts in Mail’s Signature Preferences pane.

The Signatures.plist file contains Rich Text versions of your signatures.

SmartMailboxes.plist contains the criteria which define your Smart Mailboxes, again as an XML file.Similar Posts:

• Mail 2.0′s three different file types
• The final solution: Deleting Mail.app entirely
• Sorting emails with rules and signatures
• Mailboxer: Smart mailboxes for contacts
• What is a Smart Mailbox?

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

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.Similar Posts:

• Folder Action applescript for archiving files on Gmail
• Applescripted backup for Mail and Address Book
• A dedicated, easy-to-use backup app for Apple Mail and Entourage
• Recovering deleted messages in Mail 2.0
• Importing emlx messages into Apple Mail 2.0