If you ’re trying to conserve disk place , and you ’re a user of the built - in Mail lotion , you may be overlooking one author of disk space usance : attachments on e - mails you ’ve received . By default , Mail leaves all adhesion alone , even if you deliver them to another smear on your hard driving force . Over meter , you’re able to build up quite a collection of previous attachments . Deleting these — assume you ’ve economise them elsewhere and no longer wish to keep them in Mail — can bring through a fair moment of drive distance . For example , on my simple machine , I have or so 400 MB worth of attached files , even though I ’ve saved all those files to other situation .

If you ’re running the OS X 10.4 variation of Mail , you may use a Smart Mailbox to help manage your attachments . Select Mailbox - > New Smart Mailbox , and when the dialog box come along , give your new letter box a useful name such asMessages with attachment . For the rule , just do the tonic - up to Contains Attachments and click OK . That ’s it ; your newly - created mailbox now contains a list of every e - ring armour you ’ve received that has an attachment .

Once you have the postbox set up , you may use it any number of ways . Leave the view sorted by date to see your oldest attachments ; these might be good candidate for deletion or attachment removal ( Message - > Remove Attachments ) . Alternatively , click the Size column head to sort your adherence by size of it , and then scan those content with great attachments . If you know you ’ve already relieve those adherence , blue-pencil the message or remove the adhesion . you’re able to even off attachment from multiple content — just select them using Shift and/or Command clicks , then select Message - > Remove Attachments , and they ’ll all go poof !

Just check that you have a backup before you essay this , just in lawsuit that one critical file from the foreman unexpectedly gets removed without your realizing you had yet to make unnecessary it !