Social media continues to outgrow its reach and become an integral part of everyone’s life. Today, if we visit the App Store or Play Store, we will see hundreds of different applications that are just one click away from being on your device.
While there are evils closely related to social media, too, its impact is unavoidable. Today, Apple is one of the leading brands of technological devices, and its products, like the iPhone, MacBook, Air pods, etc., are a definition of class.
The user experience is made special for an IOS user when the user gets to discover apps and features like iMovie, Airdrop, etc., on their devices only. An experienced user might also know about its feature: the Mail app.
Through this app, you can access your emails through a Google or Outlook account. However, there’s a common issue that you might face: Mail takes the most part of your storage by loading your old emails, taking a huge part of your storage.
If you are facing this issue and you’re looking to save your storage space to the safest limit, I will guide you through the process, so stay tuned!
| Device for accessing the Mail app | Steps to stop downloading old mail via the Mail app. |
| On MacBook | 1)Open Gmail, and enter your Gmail account via the Mail app. 2)Click on Settings, which can be seen at the upper right side of the screen. 3)Click the Forwarding POP/IMAP that appears at the top. 4)From here, you have to click on “Limit IMAP folders to contain no more than this many messages,” to give permission for not exceeding the mails more than the number you set them to. 5)Choose from the lowest 1000 to 100000. 6)Click on ‘Save Changes.’ |
| On iPhone | 1) Go to Settings on your iPhone (a gray gear icon). 2) Scroll until you find Accounts and Passwords. 3) Scroll until you see the Accounts section. You’ll see all the email clients that you want to deal with here. 4) Finally, tap on “Mail Days to sync.” 5) Choose from a list of date options. |
How to Stop the Mail App From Downloading Old Messages?
The Mail app might just be trying to sync your email accounts to an updated version. However, you might be worried about the amount of internal storage space it’s occupying.
- Click on the ’email client’.
- Then click to make access to your account info.
- Here, you’ll see a limit tab that displays how much limit of the total storage has been taken up by files.
- It is shown by a green slide bar, and you can guess how much storage space is still left.
- After you’ve studied your storage space, proceed further by taking these steps to stop downloading old emails on your Mail app.
How to stop the mail app from downloading old messages on Mac?
Get started by opening the Mail application on your Mac.
However, note that the following method is currently workable for Gmail only:
- Open Gmail, and enter your Gmail account via the Mail app.
- Click on “Settings,” which can be seen on the upper right side of the screen.
- Click the “Forwarding POP/IMAP” that appears at the top.
- From here, you have to click on “Limit IMAP folders to contain no more than this many messages,” to give permission for not exceeding the mails more than the number you set them to.
- Choose from the lowest 1000 to 100000.
- Click on ‘Save Changes.’
Now you have to allow the Mail app to sync emails to the latest record by clicking on the ‘Get new messages on all accounts.’
This might take some time, so make sure you’re not in a hurry and you let the process take some time to update your emails to the change in the Mail app setting you made.
How to stop the mail app from downloading old messages on your iPhone?
To stop the downloading of old messages from the Mail app on an iPhone, you need to make sure of these things:
- Find the availability of current updates of the Mail app, and if there is any one software update available, install it.
- After that’s settled, and you have with you an updated version of the Mail app on your iPhone, you should be able to set a fixed limit on how many emails you want to take up your storage.
- This limit is time-based, featuring mails from one week ago or one month ago that can be deleted from your storage.
Your iPhone is showing the option to set a limit on emails on your iPhone.
However, if it doesn’t, then it simply means that you haven’t updated the Mail app yet. Therefore, you need to update your Mail app to the current version.
However, this isn’t an accurate measure to stop downloading emails on your Mail app, so follow these steps instead:
- Go to “Settings” on your iPhone (a gray gear icon).
- Scroll until you find “Accounts and Passwords.”
- Scroll until you see the Accounts section. You’ll see all the email clients that you want to deal with here.
- Finally, tap on “Mail Days to sync.”
- Here, you’ll be choosing from a list of date options; if you want to be specific like you want emails from one week ago, then you can choose one week ago.
- You can also leave it to default at “No limit.”
Through the above two discussed methods on devices like the MacBook and iPhone, you can access emails through your Gmail and Outlook account through the Mail app, allowing you to see emails from a specific time back.
You can amend it by following these steps again, and it shouldn’t be hard for you anymore. If you’re setting a limit on downloading old emails on your Mail app, you’re saving your device’s storage, speed, and sanity.
Conclusion
Following are the key ideas to remember from this article:
- It’s possible to set a limit on downloading old mail via the Mail app.
- You can make changes in setting the limit for old emails/messages on Gmail accounts via the Mail app, but unfortunately, there’s no way for Outlook except that you may activate an Offline mode available.
- On a MacBook, you can set a limit for old emails in numbers ranging from the lowest 1000 to the maximum 10000 mails.
- On an iPhone, a user can set a limit for old mail based on a time limit like one week ago, one day ago, etc. You can either choose to set no limit.
- You can stop downloading old messages on the Mail app by using authentic ways to save your device’s storage space as a smart way to preserve the storage for other important things.
- Before setting a limit on downloading old mail/messages on your iPhone, you need to make sure that you update your Mail app to the current version.
- Find the availability of current updates of the Mail app, and if there is any one software update available, install it.