Nov 14, '13 07:15:00AM • Contributed by: Nechama
As Apple suggests, go to System Preferences > iCloud > Manage > Mail. At that point, Apple recommends, “To free up storage used by Mail, erase messages in the Junk and Trash folders.”
That’s a good start, but that’s not nearly enough. If that shows that Mail really is the culprit in hogging your iCloud storage, try deleting the attachments from your received and sent mail! That can reduce your iCloud storage tremendously. (That alone cut mine down from about 4.8 GB to 1.2 GB).
To find your mail with attachments, in Apple Mail, you can go to View > Sort by Attachments. Make certain the files are shown in descending size, so you can easily find your mail with attachments. Alternatively, you can create a Smart Mailbox by going to Mailbox > New Smart Mailbox. Name your Smart Mailbox “Has Attachments” and set the condition to “Contains Attachments.” Select “Include messages from Sent” but deselect “Include messages from Trash.”
Once you’ve found your mail with attachments, save any attachments that you want to keep (one way to do is is to go to File > Save Attachments). After you’ve saved any desired attachments, select the messages with attachments, and go to Message > Remove Attachments. If you want, delete those messages too. You may have cleared gigabytes of iCloud storage.
