How to Free Up some Space used By your IPhone's Mail App

Apple’s mail app always downloads and store the emails so you can access them easily and so Spotlight can use them. But in some cases it’s not a good thing especially if you have a lot of mails which it can use a large amount of space.

So first of all let’s take a look on how much space this application is taking.

To do so open Settings > Storage & iCloud Usage > Manage Storage and then you just have to scroll down to the mail application. This will show you how much the mail and attachments are using.

So to reduce this you can manually remove the mails especially those with attachments.

If you just want to find mails with attachments, you can tap Mailboxes > Edit > Enable Attachments

NOTE : Don’t forget to make sure that the trash is empty after cleaning your inbox.

              

But probably this is not the easiest way to do it, this method will delete your mail from the server once for all, also it will take a long time.

A Better Methode: Remove the Account and Re-Add it

For a better solution and an easier one. You can force your device’s Mail app to start over and discard all those offline copies of emails by removing your current email accounts and re-adding them.

To do this, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Tap the name of your email account > Delete Account.

 

Next, power down your device and start it back again to ensure all offline caches are completely cleared.

Open the Mail app and you’ll be asked to provide your email account details again.

Your iPhone will start downloading your mails again, but it will clear out the old backlog of cached emails and file attachments.

NOTE : This is a better solution but not the best one, is just a temporary one. After a while the Mail app will take more and more space like it used to be.

For a permanent solution you can install another Mail application and use it instead of the one of apple.