Quick Mail Tip: Find out how much space your messages are taking up
Posted by Dr. Macenstein
Here’s a quick little tip you may already know about, but I just discovered while screwing around in Mail.
If in your main Mail window you select an account under your INBOX, then hit “CMND+i” (the usual “Get Info” shortcut), you are presented with the Account Info window. This window defaults to the MESSAGES ON SERVER tab, which provides a sortable list of all messages currently residing on your mail server, along with their sizes.
From here, you can select messages (or groups of messages by Shift or Command-clicking) to delete from the server. I found this useful as I occasionally want to download and save SOME messages which I have already read on my computer onto my iPhone, but not all of the 200+ a day I get. I also sometimes get large 20+MB attachments, and do not usually want those to download to my iPhone. Using the Messages on Server tab I can quickly and selectively delete those messages, speeding up the iPhone’s Mail downloading experience.
While this might be of more interest to “old schoolers” like myself who use POP instead of IMAP, I still think it’s pretty cool. This offers you a bit more control than simply using the brute force of the Remove Now button in Mail’s Preferences>Accounts>Advanced tab, and it’s quicker than logging into webmail to delete some messages from the server.
Actually I ran into a problem today, I noticed my email taking a VERY long time to download and many times I would time out. After some thinking it popped into my head to try to clear out the messages on the server, I used the ‘remove now’ button in the advanced settings, then to the status window (cmd 0). To my surprise there were 21k+ emails sitting on my server.
Of course, after this my email checks in a blink of an eye and I magically have a lot more hard drive space available on my server.
The odd thing is that I have the setting checked to ‘Remove copy from server after retrieving a message:’ and ‘Right Away’.
Am I doing something wrong?