How to manage email on your iPhone to preserve disk space
By Justin Montgomery
While email doesn’t take up a commanding presence on the iPhone 3G, the first-generation iPhone is a different story- especially those sporting only 4GB of disk space. With the amount of music, photos, videos, etc. we load on our iPhones, conserving disk space in any way is more beneficial than you might think. Email is the perfect starting point to conserving the ever-so-precious storage space.
There’s some very simple settings and techniques to better manage your email storage and accounts to save space. First, obviously try and limit the accounts you setup on your iPhone to those you deem most important for mobile connectivity. Also, if your email account is heavy on attachments, you might think about limiting that feature on your email account to save space on your iPhone when receiving them.
Another obvious tweak is to limit the amount of emails each of your accounts downloads. Since you’re most likely going to be at a computer sooner or later, you really only need the most recent 25-50 messages, and not 200. To do this, go into your settings, click “Mail,” scroll to “Messages,” choose the “Show” line and choose either 25 or 50.
Another decent tip that most people probably don’t realize is the fact that when you delete emails on your iPhone they aren’t truly deleted on the spot, but rather cleared periodically. Thanks to a tip I found on About.com, there’s an easy fix for this:
- To do this, tap “Settings” from the home screen.
- Tap Mail.
- Tap the email account you want to change.
- In the account page, tap “Advanced.”
- In the middle of the Advanced page, there’s a subheading called “Deleted Messages.”
- Tap that and then set the iPhone to remove deleted messages after one day or one week. That way, you won’t have many deleted messages hanging around your phone, taking up space.
You’d be surprised how much this makes a difference on a loaded-down iPhone with tons of data stored on it. Managing email is an easy fix, and one that might let you afford to shove a few more tracks, photos or videos on your device.
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