iOS software
Swipe away your touchscreen troubles and rekindle your love of Apple’s mobile devices Storing 10,000 messages
Smart Mailboxes take time to design, but can save you days of effort
QI have over 10,000 messages in Mail on my iPhone now, and keep adding more each day. How can I store them better to free up space on my phone?
AWhen shared in iCloud, large mailboxes won’t normally take all that space on your iPhone. Check how much is currently in use in Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Mail, and in Settings > [yourname] > iCloud > Manage Storage for what’s stored in iCloud.
Bring order and efficiency to a huge mailbox by first moving out all messages you want to keep but don’t need immediately, into Mail’s Archive. You can do this on your iPhone whenever you get a chance, or systematically on your Mac or iCloud.com. Select the messages to move to your Archive and tap Move, then select Archive as the destination.
This should clear your Inbox to a manageable size, but as those archived messages are still stored in Mail you won’t actually have managed to free up any space yet. Do that by creating new mailboxes which you can then export to separate storage, rather than keeping them in the Mail app all the time. Sort messages from your Archive into those mailboxes or using automatic criteria in Smart Mailboxes. Although Smart Mailboxes take a little time to design carefully, they can then save you days of effort.
Once you’ve moved all the messages you want into one of these new mailboxes, select it and use the Export Mailbox command on a Mac to save it to a separate file. You can then store that on your Mac’s disks, and ensure that it’s properly backed up before deleting the original in the Mail app, which will then free up a valuable bit of space.