Attachments won’t be automatically downloaded, but will be stored online until you use them - that’ll save some space.įailing this, you can only hope to control the amount of messages Mail downloads via server settings on your email server. Click the Advanced tab and uncheck the “Automatically download all attachments” option. Click the Accounts icon and select the account you want to change settings for. Open the Mail app, click the Mail menu, and select Preferences. However, you can save some space by telling Mail not to automatically download attachments.
There was once a way to control the size of the email cache by changing the “Keep copies of messages for offline viewing” option to “Don’t keep.” This option was removed in OS X Mavericks, so there’s no longer any way to tell Mail to download less messages from within Mail itself. However, if you have gigabytes of emails in your Gmail account or elsewhere, you may not want them all on your Mac!
This makes them accessible entirely offline and allow Spotlight to index them for easy search. The Mail folder grows so large because the Mail app downloads every single email and attachment to store them on your Mac. And it’s not a bad idea to have backups of your most important stuff before deleting anything. You should just definitely use the “Review Details” button to look through and make sure you’re only removing stuff you won’t need locally.
It’s worth noting that CleanMyMac 3 has a ton of other tools to help you clean up your Mac and free up some disk space, so if you are trying to figure out how to free up some disk space, it can definitely help you. CleanMyMac 3 has a tool that will look through your email and find the large attachments and assuming you are using IMAP (which is the default), it will leave the attachments on the server and only delete the local copy.
There aren’t a lot of options for deleting your mail attachments from the local copy while leaving them on the server, but thankfully there is a piece of software that does this. The biggest thing that takes up a ton of space in your mailbox is all the attachments that come through, many of which aren’t very important. Option 1: Clean Up Mail Attachments Using CleanMyMac You’ll see how much space is being used by the Mail app for your user account. Locate the Mail folder, right-click or Control-click it, and select Get Info. Type ~/Library into the box and press Enter. Open Finder, click the Go menu, and select Go to Folder. This is where the Mail app stores its data for each user.
RELATED: How to Free Up Disk Space on a MacĮach user account on your Mac has a Mail directory in their Library folder - that’s ~/Library/Mail, or /Users/NAME/Library/Mail. But, on a MacBook with 128 GB of solid-state drive space, this can be a significant waste of space. On a Mac with a large hard drive, this isn’t a big deal. This could take up tens of gigabytes of space if you have a lot of emails. You probably shouldn't trust me or that certificate download, either.Are you using Apple’s Mail app on your Mac? Then you’re losing gigabytes of space you could be putting to better use! The mail app wants to cache every single email and attachment you’ve ever received offline. Some organizations using this USERTrust certificate have (purported) downloads of the root certificate available. I also don't have any way to test this, as I don't have an El Capitan system around. There are variations of this certificate, depending on how current the system is, and yours isn't very current.
The certificate-related folks formerly known as Comodo are now known as Sectigo, and I think this is the root certificate certificate that you'll need to load, if you can't upgrade to Sierra or High Sierra or Mojave. This is all part of the Comodo vendor reorganization. Otherwise, you'll have to acquire and load the certificate manually.
(Have an external backup or two, check that your key apps will work, check that your scanners and printers have drivers available from the hardware vendors, and upgrade.) There are other reasons to upgrade to High Sierra (or later), if your Mac supports that. If you can upgrade to Sierra or High Sierra or Mojave, you'll have the USERTrust root certificate. The USERTrust root certificate you are looking for was added in Sierra, and was not present in El Capitan.