Running macOS High Sierra (10.13.2). An odd issue has arisen wherein my Mac Mail is constantly displays a "Downloading Messages" message when no new emails are being downloaded. It often displays that several 1000 messages are being downloaded. Appears to be some sort of sync issue but it is using a lot of memory and causing the computer to run slower. Did a bit of internet searching and have noted the same problem stated by others but the limited fixes either don't work or the prescribed steps are not available to me (?). Any help is appreciated.
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I was experiencing this issue as well across four machines in my office. Over 30GB were unnecessarily being downloaded daily. Neither Apple nor G Suite (email provider) support was able to offer any meaningful solution.
I'm not sure if this is an issue with G Suite or with Mail, or maybe a combination of both. Interestingly personal gmail accounts don't seem to be affected. Regardless it was incredibly frustrating to deal with considering email working properly is one of my most basic expectations from my computer/email provider.
I have had a very similar issue... across 3 computers (2 x MBP and one iMac), we have had mail constantly downloading since late November 2017. I reported this to Apple on the 4th of December 2017, and after speaking with many support staff at Apple Care, we still as of today (23 Jan 2018) don't have a solution.
I was actually installing the yahoo account when this started, then I went to check my other Mac and there was with the same problem, always downloading emails, thousands of emails non stop. I thought it could be because of iCloud but the Mail program was not included in iCloud, I didn't do it because it would take too much space on the server and I didn't have that space. No extra storage.
Conclusion, I have been busy for about 3 days for many, many hours doing research on google to find a solution, so far nothing worked, it was messy I can say! I managed to stop the downloading but then it wouldn't receive email, only send. Also had the situation that it would stay offline giving Authentication Failed, had Login Failed, etc...........
I then went to my server, as I have gmail accounts, and I decided to delete all my MX files and then redo them (my backend has an MX File "Wizard" - which automatically puts in the required settings into each field).
And when you rebuild mailboxes for IMAP or Exchange accounts, all the messages AND attachments stored locally on your computer are first removed and then downloaded again from your mail servers back to your Mac.
POP messages above 30MB (my guess) can hang mail receipt. If you check every 5 minutes, the number of messages to be downloaded will double, triple, etc. and never download. After a day of waiting the count was something like 130,000. Actually about 1200 messages following the large one were held up. Had to go to the server and find the offending email and remove it. Then messages flowed again.
While investigating, I downloaded the same mailboxes into a Windows 10 / Thunderbird mail app, took overnight to complete, afterwards bandwidth never spiked again. Clearly looking at all the threads dating back to 2015 Mail is buggy. Luckily I only have one Mail user in my company and the rest all just use web Gmail.
You need to configure your email account(s) as POP instead of IMAP. For example, if you have the Gmail account set up as an IMAP account, all your messages are deleted from the server when you delete them from your Mac. BUT, once your account is set to POP, you should see the option to remove copy from the server after retrieving a message.
You can always setup your GMail account on your Mac as a POP3 account, and then flag GMail to mark all messages new. The next mail check would cause your mail app to download all the messages on teh GMail server to your mail client. Once they are in your mail client, you manage them locally in there, and it won't matter if the GMail host account goes away or not, because POP3 works with the local data once it is downloaded form the server.
Be advised that doing this can cause you to redownload thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of emails depending upon your email volume and how long you have been using GMail. If I do this, my GMail wants to re-send close to 6GB of data to me again because I have been using GMail for about as long as it has existed, and I average 100-200 emails a day on that account.
When I am using Apple Mail, it insists on downloading the full body and attachment 100.000+ email I have on gmail, which eats up my hard drive, and makes the interactive search function annoyingly slow.
Apple's mail on 10.11 and older will download all the mail that the server tells it about. The macOS 10.12 mail has a setting to optimize mail storage that might store header information for all mails, but not download the body and attachments of older emails.
Since that's how the mail client was designed and codes, you will need to go to gmail's web interface and hide some of the folders from IMAP access to prevent the client, macOS mail.app, from ever seeing the messages. Exchange has a setting to determine a time range of mail to sync, but google and IMAP do not appear to have that feature.
Note: Gmail downloads a copy of every email you send or receive, except for emails in Chats, Spam, and Trash. To avoid duplicates, Gmail doesn't download emails sent within your mail client, but you can still see them if you log in to Gmail.
You can export and download your data from Gmail. You can download data that hasn't been deleted. You can create an archive to keep for your records or use the data in another service. Learn how to download your data.
The least expensive and most secure way to back up your Gmail is to download all your messages using an IMAP client such as Apple Mail ( ), Microsoft Outlook ( ), or Mozilla Thunderbird. If you use such a client as opposed to a Web browser, or a browser-based application such as Mailplane, ( ) to access your Gmail account, then assuming your settings are correct (as I explain in a moment), you automatically store a local copy of every message.
If you already use an IMAP client for other accounts, you can add your Gmail account just as you would any other IMAP account. Google has a Web page with detailed setup instructions for most common IMAP clients (and I provide even better instructions for Apple Mail in this TidBits article). But in addition to setting up your account as described there, be sure your client is set to synchronize all messages, as follows:
With your client set up correctly, all you need do is remember to launch it and check your Gmail account (or allow it to check automatically) once a day. Be sure to leave it running long enough to download all your messages before quitting.
IMAP allows you to access your email wherever you are, from any device. When you read an email message using IMAP, you aren't actually downloading or storing it on your computer; instead, you're reading it from the email service. As a result, you can check your email from different devices, anywhere in the world: your phone, a computer, a friend's computer.
POP works by contacting your email service and downloading all of your new messages from it. Once they are downloaded onto your PC or Mac, they are deleted from the email service. This means that after the email is downloaded, it can only be accessed using the same computer. If you try to access your email from a different device, the messages that have been previously downloaded won't be available to you.
There are many reasons why you might want to export or download all the emails in a Gmail account. Perhaps you want to migrate the email account to a different email client, or maybe you just want a backup of all your email messages if the worst should occur.
Once upon a time, most people used a single computer for email. Your email client would connect to your email server, download all your messages onto the computer, and then delete them from the server. And that was fine because you used only one computing device, so where else would your email messages be?
I am adding my Outlook and Gmail account to mail app. Once added, it is starting to download all the mails from outlook and gmail servers from the beginning. It already downloaded almost 4GB data. I am trying to find the solution to stop this or at least limit the download.
My wife recently died, and she gave me access to her Gmail account. While I'm not sure whether or not I want to read the messages in there, I do want to make a backup copy of both the sent and received messages. Ideally, the backup copy would be accessible to me offline, though this is not strictly necessary.
You can setup an email client to download the entire contents of the account including sent mails if you configure IMAP access. The following settings work for me in Thunderbird although you can probably use any standard email client that you prefer.
Use IMAP4, it will allow browsing messages directly on the server, as well as copying them out. Practically any desktop IMAP client will allow you to mark all messages and drag them into a local folder, or into your IMAP mailbox. (At various occassions I've tested Thunderbird, Evolution, mutt, Windows [Live] Mail, Outlook, Eudora, and Outlook Express.)
Go to ,calendar. Note that this link, by default, allows you to download your calendar and your mail, but you can download data from other products by clicking on Show more products. When you click Next, you are given the option of choosing your file type and delivery method. The defaults are probably appropriate, so just click Create archive. Once google has archived your data, they will send a download link to you. 2ff7e9595c
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