Stop Gmail downloading thousands of emails to Mac Mail

Do you access Google Mail using the Mail app on your Apple Mac? It could be downloading tens of thousands of email messages that take forever to sync. There is a way to stop it doing this.

If you are a heavy user of Google Mail and have had your account for a long time, you could have a very large number of email messages stored in your account. Maybe even tens of thousands of messages. Gmail handles them without any problems in a browser, but if you use the Mail app on your Mac or some other email client then there is the potential for problems to arise.

Where you might run into difficulties is when initially setting up Gmail in the Mail app. After adding your account, Mail will download every email in your Gmail account, ever, and that could be a lot. Some people have as many as 50,000 emails going back 10 years or more.

Perform a clean install of macOS or buy a new Mac and all those thousands of emails will be synced by Mail, and it takes a long time. Mail does seem to cope with high volumes of email messages, even though it takes a long time, but not all email clients do so well. Even with Mail, it is worth limiting the number of messages it downloads.

Configure Gmail IMAP settings

Start the Mail app on your Mac, right-click the Google inbox and select Get Account Info.

The Quota Limits tab shows how much space is used in your Gmail account and the green bar is a quick way to see whether you are near your limit. I am only at 50%. Below is a list of the mailboxes. Google uses labels of course, but they work like folders in the Mail app. The number of messages and the size in megabytes is shown for each one. Notice that most of mine are 1,000 messages. How did I get that exact number?

If you set up Mail on a new Mac or a fresh install of macOS, the default is to download every single message in Gmail. It could download tens of thousands of messages and gigabytes of data. Put a limit on it or it will take a week to sync!

Limit downloaded emails in Gmail

Open a browser window and go to your Gmail account. Click the gear button at the right side of the page to show the menu and click Settings followed by See all settings.

Select the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab at the top of the page and then look down near the bottom of the page.

The default setting is Do not limit the number of messages in an IMAP folder. This means that Mac Mail will download everything. Select the setting below, Limit IMAP folders to contain no more than this many messages. There is a pop-up menu with 1,000, 2,000, 5000 and 10,000.

If you set a limit, no emails will be lost or deleted. It just means that Mail will sync only the most recent 1, 2, 5 or 10,000 messages. This is why most folders show only 1,000 messages a couple of screenshots back where I showed the quota limits. It is still 1,000 per folder and there are quite a few folders, but I have been using Gmail for over 10 years and downloading everything is firstly, unnecessary and secondly, would take far too long.

You can still open a web browser, go to Gmail and access every email ever. It just means that setting up Mail (or another email client) doesn't take forever to sync.