Doing something wrong in OSX mail, 170gb gobbled up

[GGD]

pRICE cUBE wrote:
I say hundreds but I meant thousands, sorry. The cray thing is I have trashed them and it has taken over 12 hours and slowly deleting each one. I think I have this set on imap.

Did you happen to do a "Secure Empty Trash", if it really was 170GB that you trashed, it will take quite a while to zero that much disk space.

Which makes me think, it will also take quite a while to create and write that many files. Did this really happen suddenly?