Drive Filling Up? Check Your Mail Log Settings

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how one simple setting in your Mail App could be filling up your Mac's drive quickly. 

There are a lot of different reasons why your Mac's drive could be filling up. You could be just creating a lot of content. Or there could be various other apps and processes that are storing a lot of data. But one very small setting in Mail could actually be putting gigabytes of needless information on your drive, filling it up, and you may not even realize it. These are Mail Logs. Basically text files that are recording every transaction between your Mail App and the servers you use for email. You would use Mail Log to troubleshoot problems. 

Now, normally they aren't turned on. It's not recording these. But you may have been told by somebody helping you with support to turn them on to help you troubleshoot something, or maybe you saw the setting and turned it on yourself, thinking you might use it later. But it stores so much information in these text files that it could fill up gigabytes in just days. Hundreds of gigabytes in weeks, and fill up your drive. None of the normal places you look for large files will reveal them.

So here I am in the Mail App. If I want to find the setting for logging mail connections I won't find it in Mail, Settings where you think you would. Not in any one of these. Not in System Settings. It's in the Window Menu. There's a special window called Connection Doctor. Here you've got this window that will show you the status of your connections to your email's servers. You may have a lot more than just the in and out here for iCloud. You may have several different mail accounts listed here. You have the option here to log the connection activity. You can see I've got it checked here. This is one you want to look for. If it's checked, it means it's filling up a file with every connection to your email server with data and it's going to get big fast. 

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Even if you've got this turned Off you still want to go and checkout the Log Files because you may have had it turned On previously and never deleted the Log Files that you are not using anymore. So, to find the Log Files look for the Show Logs button here. The Log Files are actually hidden deep in your Library Folder and there's no point in talking about the path to get there because this button will take you there instantly. It will open up a New Finder Window right to that folder. You can see how deep it is here in your Home Folder, Library, etc. 

Here are these text files. You can see I've got two that are updated today, corresponding to these two connections here. My incoming mail and outgoing mail. So, you can see here this one is already 10 megs, but I just turned on logging just before starting this video. So it already grew to this size just with its initial checks for email. Every connection could be adding a lot more to this. Sometimes when it is syncing the entire account it will take even more. So, of course, if you've turned this On on purpose and you want to log your Mail activity, well, that's fine. Just remember you've got it turned On and remember to use it for whatever it is you're doing and turn it Off when you're done. 

Also, get rid of the log files so they don't take up space if you don't need them anymore. But otherwise make sure this is turned Off normally. Make sure you use Show Logs to go here and then make sure you delete these files. You could just drag them to the trash or use Command Delete or Move To Trash through the menu like that and empty your trash and it will clear off the space. 

But look at how fast these can fill up. I'll turn this back On here and you can see it immediately it adds a file that's zero bytes. Now let's go ahead and simply check for new email. So, in the Mail App I'll get new email like this and it's going to connect. You can see right away it starts adding some to this file. 25K just for a simple check where I didn't get any new messages. Let's do another check right here when I know I've got an incoming message here. So, we'll get New Mail and we'll see there's a message that came in. You can see how it jumped to 60K. Just to get that one message.

So again if you're not using your Mail Logs the first thing you want to do is check to make sure this is turned Off. Then remember that that does not delete the existing Mail Logs. So you want to use Show Logs to jump to this folder. If there is anything here you can just delete it. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.