M07... Mail on Mac has IMAP folder option. You can turn off the connection to ALL MAIL locally on Mac. However I am not in front of Mac right now and haven't done this option for a few years... But I'll check on it later (if I remember).
Otherwise google around for IMAP folder settings in mail.app
128GB. I have been working with between 1 and 3 GB free for the last year or so - getting harder and harder! I had been unsyncing dropbox folders to make space, just keeping the ones I was working on in the drive, but it's untenable. Then I realised just how much of the drive was being taken up by mail. I don't need old mail on this machine (and solved that problem yesterday). But I DO need current mail (say, the last year's worth) but NOT several copies of it!
Quite why Gmail sets itself up so that I get multiple copies of the same mail is beyond me.
OK - so I tried a number of the solutions suggested above.
From PIN: "Contact your IT dept". Well, we don't have one. But we do have a company we pay a monthly retainer to for IT advice, so I thought it was worth a shot. Sent them a long email explaining the issue (much as above) and their response was "can we send an engineer over to look at your blackberry?". FAIL.
From BaconBreadBaker: You can set it up in Mac Mail. Well I've googled this for over an hour and read dozens of apple forums and others. It just doesn't seem to be possible. SAD, I liked this idea.
So, I've fudged it. I've set up a brand new smartone blackberry email account and am copying my gmail to it, and it's go my gmail address as the "reply to" email. Its receiving email and it looks more or less correct on the recipient end (not quite normal, but ok). I guess that's the 90% solved that might just be good enough. Although my calendar does not appear to be functioning right either which could be more problematic
For anyone else who ever has a similar issue.
Last edited by MovingIn07; 30-04-2013 at 01:43 PM.
I've not much experience with Google Apps mail, but can't you access it via webmail?
There is an option within Mail that will not keep any messages on the Mac, or no attachments, or only messages you've read. Is that an option Moving?
It is possible to move the entire Mail library over to an external hard disk so you can save space on your Macbook Air, but it is a bit messy to do.
Not an option. As I noted in my OP, I need access to mail downloaded so that I can use it when travelling, on planes and in countries where internet access is too dodgy to rely on.
Anyway, ONE copy of all my email in the last 18 months is perfectly fine ... it was the 2 (or in some cases, 3 or 4) copies that were causing the problem.