How do I get Apple Mail to stop re-caching my messages all the time?

October 6, 2008 5:34 AM

Apple Mail keeps re-caching my messages...

I use Google Apps for domains for my email, which is basically the Gmail engine. I've got 2 computers polling the same account via IMAP, both on 10.5.4- my laptop is fine, but my desktop is always Caching my messages over and over (I can see this in the activity window). In addition to having a lot of disk churn, it's eating up crazy space on my Time Machine every day. The desktop has this problem whether the laptop is on or not, so I'm pretty sure it's not some odd race condition with flagging messages.

What gives? I've tried deleting and re-creating the account, but I can't figure out which file holds the actual headers (when I re-create the account, the message list comes back immediately, intact)?

Bonus question- how do I selectively remove my recent mail message backups from Time Machine? It's about 100G I'd like to reclaim.

posted by mkultra to computers & internet (6 comments total)

I should note that this started a little over a week ago, no config changes...
posted by mkultra at 5:38 AM on October 6

You have not told us how you have Apple mail configured. IMAP, POP?
posted by OwlBoy at 7:01 AM on October 6

IMAP (it's in the question)
posted by mkultra at 7:03 AM on October 6

How to delete objects from Time Machine backups
posted by edd at 9:45 AM on October 6

I think the nature of google's IMAP implementation causes the caching. Mine does it too.

What I've done though, is minimize what it stores on the server (under the account.) It caches less...especially drafts

Second, one thing I haven't explored as much as I should, is the "Archiving" feature (right click on a folder for this.
posted by filmgeek at 2:33 PM on October 6

You might also want to look at this...

Google updated what/how gmail caches:
posted by filmgeek at 11:09 AM on October 14