On the first-generation iPhone, disk space is at a premium. With just 4GB, 8GB, or 16GB available to hold music, movies, calendars, contacts, and photos, it seems there’s never quite enough room for it all.
But there are ways to free up some disk space on your phone for the things you want more. One of them is to carefully manage how you store and delete email.
Email isn’t likely to take up a huge amount of space on your phone unless you get a lot of attachments or have many accounts configured (I have six on my phone, so any little bit helps). Still, there are two ways you can tweak your iPhone email settings to save disk space.
Download Fewer Emails
You can limit the number of emails that your iPhone downloads for each email account you have configured. Needless to say, the fewer emails downloaded, the less disk space they’ll take up.
- To set this limit low, tap “Settings” from the home screen.
- Tap Mail.
- In the Mail Settings screen, scroll to the middle subheading called “Messages.” In the “Show” line, you can set the phone to show only your most recent 25, 50, 75, 100, or 200 messages. The lower the number you use, the less disk space the emails will take up.
Delete Emails Sooner
When you delete an email on the iPhone, the disk space isn’t immediately freed up. Instead, that happens when the iPhone periodically clears deleted content from its memory.
You can free up disk space by making sure the phone clears those messages faster.
- 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 weay, you won’t have many deleted messages hanging around your phone, taking up space.
