MacOS – How to stop Mail.app from automatically downloading full messages

emailmacosmail.app

I'm a college student and a student employee at my college's IT office. We recently upgraded to Google Apps for Education for our college email, and we also have a high proportion of Mac users on campus (students, faculty, staff, and administrators).

My manager in IT pointed out that since Mavericks came out, it seems as though Mail.app is automatically downloading the entirety of all messages from the server for caching purposes so Spotlight can search them instantly. For normal users, I'd imagine this is fine. We have some institutional users with 20+ years of email (hundreds of thousands of messages), and this new feature of Mac Mail is slowing their computers down significantly. My manager said that Mail.app previously just downloaded message headers, but now it's downloading full text and attachments. From searching this topic on AskDifferent, I know that it's possible to turn off auto-downloading of attachments by going to Preferences>Accounts>Advanced> and unchecking "Automatically download attachments."

Is there a way to turn off the auto-downloading of full message text as well, and force Mail.app to only download headers of archived mail?

Best Answer

You may try a workaround: users with high email count can configure their Google Apps accounts not to sync more than 1000 emails per label (or folder).

Each user will have to:

Go to their Gmail interface
Go to Settings (by clicking on the gear in the upper-right hand side of the page)
Select the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab
Look for "Folder Size Limit "and check "Limit IMAP folders to contain no more than this many messages" and select 1000 (or another number that seems appropriate)

Related Solutions

How to stop iCal from launching Mail.app

The instructions below (posted here) did it for us as our permissions were, actually, on "Read Only" and the Mail.app was still launching.

Note: If iCal still opens Mail.app for mailing an event after you have set Postbox as your default mail client:

Within the Finder, right-click on the iCal icon and then select Show Package Contents.
Navigate to the "Contents" folder, then the "Resources" folder. Right-click on the folder called "Scripts" and select Get Info.
Expand the Sharing & Permissions box and click the Lock Icon in the lower right hand corner to unlock this setting. Change any permissions that are listed as "Read Only" to "Read & Write."
Restart Postbox.

If more information is needed, check out a more detailed Postbox iCal Integration page for more options and troubleshooting tips.

Have a great day!

MacOS – Automatically Save Attachments in Mail.app in 10.8 Mountain Lion

Try this.

   using terms from application "Mail"
    on perform mail action with messages theMessages for rule theRule
        -- The folder to save the attachments in (must already exist)


        -- Save in a sub-folder based on the name of the rule in Mail

        set subFolder to name of theRule
        tell application "Finder"
            set attachmentsFolder to ((path to home folder as text) & "Dropbox:Attachments") as text
            if not (exists folder subFolder of folder attachmentsFolder) then
                make new folder at attachmentsFolder with properties {name:subFolder}
            end if
        end tell
        tell application "Mail"

            repeat with eachMessage in theMessages

                set {year:y, month:m, day:d, hours:h, minutes:min} to eachMessage's date sent
                set timeStamp to ("" & y & "-" & my pad(m as integer) & "-" & my pad(d) & "-" & my pad(h) & "-" & my pad(min))

                try
                    -- Save the attachment
                    repeat with theAttachment in eachMessage's mail attachments

                        set originalName to name of theAttachment
                        set savePath to attachmentsFolder & ":" & subFolder & ":" & timeStamp & " " & originalName
                        try
                            save theAttachment in file (savePath)
                        end try
                    end repeat

                    display dialog subFolder
                end try
            end repeat

        end tell
    end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from

-- Adds leading zeros to date components
on pad(n)
    return text -2 thru -1 of ("00" & n)
end pad

I have posted a more general Automatically Save Attachments in Mail.app on my blog

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