Swapped all my phone stuff onto a new handset this week – and was then dismayed to see that the mail app filled up lots of my nice new memory and chewed through 80% of my monthly data allowance by downloading hundreds of old emails from the mail server every time it connected 👿

I’ve now disallowed mobile data for the mail app, but it still goes into download frenzy when connected via wifi.

IIRC, older versions of iOS had a setting where you could limit the number of emails displayed???? Either that or a memory allocation would be useful, bug I can’t find either…

Any tips much appreciated!!!

Sounds a bit odd.

Have you looked to see how much storage it is actually using?
(Settings->Storage and iCloud Usage->Manage Storage)

I have two email accounts with thousands of messages in each and it currently only takes up 76MB.

Switch off ‘Fetch New Data’ too so it only fetches new messages when you open the app.

You can’t limit the number of emails anymore, it manages itself.

I run a Gmail and company email account on mine and Mail App takes up 1.1GB.

My partners phone did this last night, I assume iOS has updated itself without asking.
It has stopped marking emails as read on the hot mail server too so now she has 9000 “new” emails….!

Currently 144mb and fetch set to manual… (So not responsible for the data usage 😕 )

But each manual fetch results in another couple hundred old emails being downloaded.
Newest version of iOS installed

It’s probably just downloading the message headers, not the full messages: assuming your mail account is IMAP or Exchange rather than an old school POP account. Doesn’t sound like it is taking too much space.

Settings->Mobile Data will give you a breakdown of how much mobile data each app used – that should identify what used your data plan up.

Mail, Safari and Facebook biggest mobile data use (1.1, 7 and 5 gb respectively)