Most of us keep the same email address for years. If you take a peek at your email account, then chances are you have a few hundred, or perhaps even a few thousand emails cluttering up your inbox โ but if you use macOSโ Mail app, then there might also be a few thousand email attachments cluttering up your hard drive!
By default, Mail downloads and stores every single attachment you receive, to ensure they remain available offline and also appear in your Spotlight searches.
Assuming youโre using IMAP (which Mail uses by default), all of your attachments are available on the server for you to re-download at any point, so storing them locally is almost always a complete waste of time.
If youโve never gone into the Mail application and deleted your email attachments, then you could be wasting gigabytes of space! In this article Iโll show you two different ways to delete your email attachments, and potentially free up a tonne of disk space. And, once youโve solved the problem, Iโll show you how to make sure it never happens again, by tweaking Mailโs settings so that it no longer downloads every single attachment thatโs sent to your email address.
How much space is Mail actually using?
Before you start deleting attachments, you may want to check just how much space Mail is using, so you can see exactly how much memory youโve reclaimed by deleting your attachments.
- Open a Finder window.
- Select โGo > Go to Folderโฆโ from the menu bar.
- Type โ~/Library/โ and then press โGo.โ
- Control-click the โMailโ folder, and then select โGet Info.โ The subsequent window contains lots of information about your Mail account, including the amount of space itโs taking up on your hard drive.
Clearing your email attachments
Thereโs two ways that you can banish all of those unnecessary email attachments from your Mac:
- Use a third party app. If you donโt mind downloading some additional software, then CleanMyMac 3 can identify and delete all of your attachments automatically.
- Do It Yourself. Frustratingly, thereโs no built-in way to delete all of your downloaded attachments, so if you donโt want to use a third party app, then youโll need to go through your emails manually. Thereโs a few tricks that you can use to speed up this process, but thereโs no way around it: you will need to select every email in turn, and delete its corresponding attachment.
Clearing all your attachments manually
This is the more time-consuming option, but it doesnโt require you to download any additional software โ and if youโre concerned about disk space, then you might not be wild about the idea of downloading yet another application.
- Launch the Mail app, if you havenโt already.
- Select your inbox.
- You can save yourself some time by bringing the biggest messages to the top, as these will often contain the largest attachments. Open the โSort byโ dropdown, and select โSize.โ
- Select the first message that has an attachment, and then click โMessage > Remove Attachmentsโ from the menu bar.
- Rinse and repeat for every message that contains an attachment.
Deleting attachments, using ClearMyMac
The quickest and easiest way to delete all of your email attachments, is to use the CleanMyMac application:
- Launch CleanMyMac.
- Click the โScanโ button.
- Once the scan is complete, itโll return its recommendations, which should include deleting any downloaded email attachments. Make sure the โMail Attachmentsโ checkbox is selected, and then click โClean.โ
Stop downloading all attachments automatically
Once youโve cleared your email attachments, youโll want to make sure you never get into this situation again. You can tell Mail not to download any attachments in the future, by tweaking its settings. Note that all of your attachments will still be available online, so as long as you have an Internet connection, youโll be able to view them as normal.
- Select โMail > Preferencesโฆโ from the Mail menu bar.
- Select your account from the left-hand menu.
- Select the โAdvancedโ tab.
- Find the โAutomatically download all attachmentsโ checkbox, and deselect it.
Using Gmail?
If youโve registered your Gmail account in the Mail app, then you can also prevent your Gmail from downloading any attachments:
- Select โMail > Preferencesโฆโ from the Mail menu bar.
- Select the โAccountsโ tab.
- Choose your Gmail account from the left-hand menu.
- Make sure the โAccount Informationโ tab is selected.
- Open the โDownload Attachmentsโ dropdown, and select either โRecentโ or โNone.โ
Before you go
After spending over 20 years working with Macs, both old and new, theres a tool I think would be useful to every Mac owner who is experiencing performance issues.
CleanMyMac is highest rated all-round cleaning app for the Mac, it can quickly diagnose and solve a whole plethora of common (but sometimes tedious to fix) issues at the click of a button. It also just happens to resolve many of the issues covered in the speed up section of this site, so Download CleanMyMac to get your Mac back up to speed today.
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