1. One thing that annoys me with Apple's Mail app is that it stores attachments to be opened in a separate folder (in /Library/Mail Downloads). I wanted to make those Mail attachments appear in a subdirectory of my Downloads folder (or alternatively, in the Download folder itself, or in /var/tmp, which I clear regularly with a cron task).
2. The Mac operating system has several system level temporary folders which contain temp files used by MacOS itself along with various Mac apps. This temp folders are not intended to be user facing, but in some rare situations an advanced Mac user may find themselves requiring to locate the temp folder and maybe even to muck around in there.
3. These are the steps to change the Downloads folder using various browsers on your Mac computer.
4. On the other hand Mac Mail is a desktop-based email application used by Mac OS users. There are time when user wants to configure Gmail with Mac mail in order to access Gmail data on desktop. In this article we have come up with a solution how to import Gmail folders into mac mail or how to sync Gmail folders with Apple mail.

What Are Mail Downloads On Mac

Email Folder free download - Folder Guard, Folder Size, Folder Hidden, and many more programs.

Note that the name of this folder is localized. In German it's called 'Geladene Mail-Anhänge' (Downloaded Mail Attachments)

@kirkmc - Mail saves the attachments for offline viewing.

I was going to say the same -- for IMAP connections, Mail keeps these offline so they're available without needing to re-download them each time...
Just another reason to stick with good-ol' POP...
Cheers,
Peter

Right--it actually makes a fair amount of sense on IMAP connections so you don't end up re-downloading large attachments repeatedly, since I'm pretty sure IMAP attachments are NOT downloaded along with the messages during a sync.
Example: I have a message with 10MB of large images attached to it in an IMAP account. With the 'delete on quit' option selected, every time I view that message, if I have quit Mail since the last time, it will need to re-download those 10MB of images to display them. For someone like me, who passes a lot of images around via email (business reasons), that would be incredibly annoying--it would render Mail.app nearly unusable, in fact.

Not really. Your comment made me test it - I disconnected from my internet connections and test-opened a bunch of attachments. They all opened no problem, without complaining that there was no connection to the IMAP server. I quit Mail, saw them deleted from the above mentioned folder, and repeated.
Attachments are stored offline in Mail, and this folder is a duplicate location when the user decides to open the attachment...
Just my 2 cents..

Interesting. I stand entirely corrected, then.
I had always assumed, since when you first view an IMAP message with large image attachments you can see the image attachments queueing for download, that they were going into that folder.
This being the case, this is a very valuable tip for those short on disk space (those of us with SSDs, in particular).

Actually you were partially right. The thing is that most email clients have an OPTION that allows you to keep copies of messages with or without attachments for offline viewing.
For your desktop or laptop computer turning this option on makes a LOT of sense, and I believe it is the default for Apple Mail and Outlook.
For other mobile devices like smartphones and tablets this option does NOT make a lot of sense so many mail clients don't even include it.

After noticing that this folder was taking up a lot of space on my mac, I cleared it out, and then set up a Hazel action for it, so that files added to it will only be in there for a few months, then trashed.

Under Mountain Lion my version of this folder is ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads
@petersconsult not sure why you'd want to run POP in this day and age. I check the same e-mail accounts on 4 different devices, IMAP's the only way to stay sane doing that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Message_Access_Protocol#Advantages_over_POP

Mail Downloads Folder Mac Mail

Seriously.

I'm as big a fan of local storage as the next luddite, but when you try to access three different mail accounts from a home desktop, a home laptop, a work desktop, an iPhone, and an iPod Touch in any functional way, POP does not cut it. Besides, with offline caching, there's really not that much difference between IMAP and POP (unless the IMAP server instructs your local computer to purge the entire contents of a folder or something, in which case you're relying on your local backup).

Thanks for the heads up. I found my downloads folder in the same place. Running Mountain Lion 10.8.3.

Mail Downloads Folder Mac Air

Email Folders In Windows 10

to clear disk space basically I create rules, It helps me to manage my account more efficiently.

Hello,
I had the same issue about having large amount of attachments in Mail, so I've done a little script to save attachments file into an external drive or directory, and also delete all attachments files gracefully
If IMAP, nor just 'find', is not enough for your case, maybe the script could be useful:
https://github.com/blues-man/mail-attachments-util
chmod 755 mail_util.sh
# Recover all attachments, organized by accounts and Folders, putting them on an external drive set explicitly in the script
./mail_util.sh
# Delete all attachments asking for each account
./mail_util.sh --delete
# Delete all attachments asking for each file per account
./mail_util.sh --delete --ask
Bye