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elgrayso

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 20, 2013
39
0
my 5gb iCloud backup space is full, but about half of that appears to be just emails over the years.
is there a simple way to store the majority of the emails locally, or prefferably, just store the attachments locally and keep the text?
 
my 5gb iCloud backup space is full, but about half of that appears to be just emails over the years.
is there a simple way to store the majority of the emails locally, or prefferably, just store the attachments locally and keep the text?

Pretty easy to offload old emails to local storage. My example is for Mavericks...if you have an older version of Mail/OS X, though, it should be similar. Just create a new mailbox in Mail on OS X, for location, select "On My Mac". Give it a name that makes sense - like old email, 2007-2008 email, whatever. Under that, create a structure of mailboxes that makes sense, like for sent and inbox, or whatever else. Then just sort your inbox/archive, wherever you have the old emails on Apple's servers, and drag them to the appropriate local folder...it will download a copy of the messages and delete from the server. That should free up some space. If the emails are important to you, ensure you do a local backup as well, in case your Mac goes belly up or has another problem.
 
iCloud full. Store email locally?

Id just go online and routinely wipe all emails older than 90days or so. There might even be an automatic setting to configure.

If you're wanting to keep ALL email forever, you need to find other options: Pay for iCloud storage, or research other providers, or roll your own.
 
Just create a new mailbox in Mail on OS X, for location, select "On My Mac". Give it a name that makes sense - like old email, 2007-2008 email, whatever. Under that, create a structure of mailboxes that makes sense, like for sent and inbox, or whatever else. Then just sort your inbox/archive, wherever you have the old emails on Apple's servers, and drag them to the appropriate local folder...it will download a copy of the messages and delete from the server. That should free up some space.

I made a folder "on my mac" called "2011 and earlier" and dragged 3k+ emails to it, which should be close to half of my emails.
however when i checked my "icloud" storage on my phone it still says 2.5G is being used up by mail.

i dont see a way to refresh though...
 
I made a folder "on my mac" called "2011 and earlier" and dragged 3k+ emails to it, which should be close to half of my emails.
however when i checked my "icloud" storage on my phone it still says 2.5G is being used up by mail.

i dont see a way to refresh though...

May take some time to update. Try again later. Make sure you dragged without the green + (i.e., didn't copy).
 
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