Phantom drafts

QWhen I open Mail, I often see a message that it’s saving over 800 drafts, taking up almost 3GB. I don’t have any drafts, so why does this appear?

AOpen Mail’s preferences and click the Accounts tab. For each account that’s listed here, check which mailbox is set as the location for storing draft messages. Normally this will be a dedicated Drafts mailbox within the corresponding account. Using this information, you’ll need to compare the contents of those mailboxes in Mail with the corresponding locations in Finder.

Open a Finder window and press ß+ç+G, type

~/Library/Mail and then press ® . In the location that opens, dig through the folders to find the files that correspond to each email account’s drafts mailbox (if that’s listed as Drafts in Mail, it’ll be called Drafts.mbox, for example.). That’s the one that should contain your unfinished messages. If you have none, there’ll only be Info.plist here; otherwise, you have drafts after all.

If a repair is needed, quit Mail, shut down any other Macs or iOS devices that use the same email account, and ensure you have a recent backup. Reopen Mail. In Mailbox > Erase Deleted Items, choose the account the problematic mailbox belongs to. Select the Drafts mailbox in the left pane and then choose Mailbox > Rebuild. That should clear out any old crud left there, and hopefully your Mac won’t keep saving drafts.

Mail’s preferences show the location of the Drafts mailbox for each account, which should correspond to an item in ~/Library/Mail.