Don't let Mail attachments accumulate and waste space

TidBITS Talk
8

Same here (on Big Sur, and I never use Apple’s Mail app). Interestingly, the six “Mail” folders have different icons:

Screen Shot 2022-12-27 at 18.16.55
Screen Shot 2022-12-27 at 18.16.55917×225 31.2 KB

If I do a “Get Info” on each, one however:

Screen Shot 2022-12-27 at 18.37.41
Screen Shot 2022-12-27 at 18.37.41261×413 25.1 KB

I can see that they each have different real-world names. The six “Mail” folders are actually::

  • com.apple.mail
  • com.apple.mail.MailQuickLookExtension
  • com.apple.MailShareExtension
  • com.apple.share.Mail.compose
  • com.apple.share.Mail.compose-back-to-sender
  • com.apple.STMExtension.Mail

GetFileInfo indicates that the C bit (meaning custom icon) is set and all other attributes are off:

$ GetFileInfo com.apple.mail
directory: "/Users/.../Library/Containers/com.apple.mail"
attributes: avbstClinmedz
created: 04/01/2013 18:07:16
modified: 12/14/2022 18:38:03

I don’t see any BSD extended attributes:

$ ls -ldO com.apple.mail
drwx------@ 6 ...  staff  - 192 Dec 14 18:38 com.apple.mail/

I’m not sure where the Finder is getting the custom name from. I looked at the two .plist files contained at the root level of each of these folders (using plutil -p filename) but didn’t find in there that might contain a different user-visible filename.