How to Delete Mail Attachments on Mac? Check & Remove Them from Mail

MacOS Mail application takes up a lot of storage space? Easily free up disk space!

The Mail application on macOS may take up a lot of storage space depending on the settings. In addition to saving a copy of the email body, Mail also downloads a copy of the attachment. With too many accessories, Mac storage will be filled up quickly, and these accessories may never be used. Fortunately, finding and deleting unwanted mail files from your Mac storage allows you to easily free up disk space.

This article will show you how to manage emails and free up space on your Mac by deleting email attachments. Let's get started!

How to check Mail storage space on your Mac

Before you start cleaning up the storage space of Mail on your Mac, it is best to know how much space it actually takes up. If the space occupies a small amount, it may not be worth cleaning up the space.

How to check Mail storage on Mac:

1. In "Findor", click the "Apple" icon in the menu bar, and select "About this machine".
2. Click "Storage Space" and then click "Manage".
3. In the left sidebar, you can see how much storage space Mail takes up.

Where are email attachments stored on your Mac?

Mail attachments are saved in the Downloads folder on your Mac. You can access the Downloads folder through the Mac's browser menu and finder.

How to delete email attachments on Mac

Be a habit of cleaning up email attachments to keep your Mac running and improve its performance. Fortunately, there are several ways to achieve this:

1. Delete attachments in a single message
2. Clean multiple attachments in the Mail application
3. Manually clean Mail storage on your Mac
4. Clean Mail storage using MacKeeper

Please follow this guide carefully to reduce the burden on your Mac disk by deleting email attachments.

1. Delete attachments in a single message

One of the best ways to manage email attachments is to delete them when you receive them. This helps prevent them from accumulating over time and becoming a hassle. Here is how to delete email attachments:

1. Open the "Mail" application on your Mac and select the message that contains the attachment you want to delete.
2. Select "Mail" in the top menu bar, and then select "Delete Attachment".

Do you want to clear the entire "Download" folder? Learn how to delete downloads on your Mac.

2. Clean up multiple attachments in the Mail application

You can delete attachments from one email at a time (as mentioned before) or delete attachments from multiple emails in the Mail client (see the difference below).

To delete multiple attachments in Mail on Mac:

1. Press the Command A key to select multiple messages in the Mail application.
2. From the menu bar, select "Mail".
3. Click "Delete Attachment".

If you have a MacBook device running macOS Sierra, you will notice that the "Delete Attachment" option does not appear. In this case, you can use another method to delete the mail attachment. Simply open the "Mail" application, select "Mail" in the menu bar, then select "Preferences", then click "Account", and set "Download Attachment" to "None".

3. Manually clean Mail storage on your Mac

You can also use Finder to manually clean up Mail storage on your Mac. But this requires browsing many different folders, some of which have long and complex names. So, this is not the best way to clean up Mail storage, but it is also feasible.

The following is how to manually delete Mail files on your Mac:

1. In "Findor", click "Go" in the top menu bar.
2. Press and hold the Option key to display the Library and click it.
3. Navigate to "Resource Library > Mail". There you will find a folder that starts with V and is followed by a number. Click on it.
4. If you browse the subfolders in this folder, you will find that there are some "attachments" folders in them that you can delete. To help you find them, type "Attachments" in the search bar and delete what appears in the search results.
5. You may also see a folder called "Mail Download" in the Resource Library. Open it and find the downloaded file in it.
6. In addition to the downloaded attachments, the Mail folder location also contains your mail file. These files have the .emlx extension. If you don't open them, you can't recognize what they are, but if you want to clear all of these files, you can drag them to the Trash. But these files are small, so it's usually not worth the effort, and it's best to use the Mac Mail client to clear your mail.

4. Use MacKeeper to clean up Mail storage space

With MacKeeper, you can easily scan mail attachments and cache files in Mail. This is the easiest way to find and delete Mail files in your Mac storage space.

How to use MacKeeper to clean email files:

1. Start MacKeeper.
2. Select "Safe Cleanup" in the menu on the left, and then click "Start Scan".
3. After the scan is completed, you can click "Clean junk files" to clear specific data on the disk.
4. For more information, please click "Email Attachment". Then, select an email account and click the arrow next to it to see which attachments Mail has saved.
5. MacKeeper may also find files in Mail's cache. To check, when MacKeeper completes scanning, click "Cache", and then view "Mail Cache".

Depending on how you use email and settings in Mail, you may not need to clean up Mail storage on your Mac regularly. However, after long use, it is easy for you to lose GB of storage due to unwanted email attachments and pictures.

You can prevent Mail attachments from becoming a problem by changing settings in the Mail application and scanning your Mac with MacKeeper periodically.

How to change Mail attachment settings

The text portion of the email does not take up much space. On the other hand, the size of the attachment may be several megabytes. Over time, they quickly accumulate and fill your system disk. Fortunately, it's easy to prevent Mail from automatically downloading attachments.

To change attachment settings in Mail on Mac:

1. In Mail, go to the menu bar and select "Mail > Preferences".
2. Click "Account" and select the email account you want to change.
3. In the "Download Attachment" drop-down menu, select "None".

There are also options to download only the most recent attachments or download all attachments. This is a quick and easy way to manage attachments that Mail automatically downloads. If Mail is set to not download attachments, you can still manually download them if needed.

Delete Mail storage attachments to free up space

Many people ignore deleting email attachments when maintaining MacBook Pro or Air devices. However, this simple operation can help optimize your Mac, reduce junk files and free up much-needed space – albeit not permanent.

What better way to delete unwanted email attachments than using efficient tools? MacKeeper's Secure Cleanup tool automatically cleans up email attachments, saving you time and effort. Use it regularly to keep your Mac free from clutter.

FAQ

Is it important to use POP3 or IMAP?

There are two main ways to connect to an email account: POP3 and IMAP. With POP3, your email will be downloaded to your Mac and deleted from the server. But with IMAP, they remain on the server after being downloaded to your Mac. This is an important difference when you try to clean Mail storage from your Mac. If you delete Mail attachments on your Mac, they will be downloaded again the next time you sync, unless you set Mail to not download the attachment.

Can you stop using Mail?

If you use Mail to access webmail accounts like Gmail, you may not need to use it at all. You can access your email only through a web browser, so your email and its attachments will be stored on a remote server, not on your Mac.

In addition to more controls and options, Mail provides tight integration with other built-in macOS applications, such as calendars. However, if you don't use these features, you can save a lot of storage space by simply not using Mail.

Where is the email stored on your Mac?

You will find that your email is stored in various subfolders of ~/Library/Mail. There is also the attachment folder , which contains the downloaded files. You may also see Mail downloads in Resource Library. Now, delete the files in it to retrieve some disk space.

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