Doing something wrong in OSX mail, 170gb gobbled up

[pRICE cUBE]

Running OSX mail in conjunction with my Gmail account and my 170gb of free disk space disappears overnight. In the mail folders I have multiple 32mb chunks of files, hundred of them in the "recovered" email folder. They are not email I have ever sent. What are these and where did they come from, why are they eating up my hd space?

[Paul F.]

POP or IMAP gmail account?

( I don't know, but I figure that's a place to start!)

[GGD]

Run Disk Inventory X to see what is using the space. Hundreds of 32MB files doesn't add up to 170GB, so maybe there is some sort of mail issue, but it's also possible that there is a bigger issue someplace else.

http://www.derlien.com/downloads/index.html

Also, on those strange files, what are the creation dates? Were they all just recently created during the time all of the disk space got consumed.

[pRICE cUBE]

GGD wrote:
Run Disk Inventory X to see what is using the space. Hundreds of 32MB files doesn't add up to 170GB, so maybe there is some sort of mail issue, but it's also possible that there is a bigger issue someplace else.

http://www.derlien.com/downloads/index.html

Also, on those strange files, what are the creation dates? Were they all just recently created during the time all of the disk space got consumed.

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.

[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?

[pRICE cUBE]

GGD wrote:
[quote=pRICE cUBE]
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?
I had to do the secure erase or else it would not delete them. I believe it happened over a couple days worth of having the mail app open for a few hours at a time. I would see a bunch of recovered files in the mail window and delete them. I had to go to the Library file once my 170gb free disappeared when I left mail open overnight.

[modelamac]

That's the kind of thing that can happen if somehow Mail suddenly thinks it is seeing a new account or an existing account fort the first time.

Somehow all of the email in the trash not yet removed and all email remaining on the server get reloaded. I've had 4 copies of each of 200+ emails show up covering the last two months. I clear it all out, empty the Mail trash, and then do a Safe boot. That fixes it until the net time, which is usually several years, or until I re-configure an existing account with a new password.

Screwy stuff, but it happens. I still have not figured out what triggers it. I tried rebuilding Mail once and regretted it.