One of our Macs kept filling up its SSD even though there isn’t supposed to be anything more stored on it. Photos is set to optimize its storage, and Messages is set to only keep messages for a year. It should be pretty much in a steady state, but we kept getting alerts from Mail that it couldn’t launch because there wasn’t enough free space. It’s an M4 MacBook Air used mostly for Web stuff, but somehow it felt as slow as the Intel one it had replaced.
I deleted unused apps and offloaded photos. Restarting sometimes helped, so I thought maybe it was an issue with Time Machine snapshots not being reclaimed promptly, which has been an issue before. But what data would even be changing so much to create large snapshots?
The problem kept getting worse, so I broke out OmniDiskSweeper. It didn’t find anything unusual, except it showed that the totals for the main folders added up to about 90 GB less than was reportedly used on SSD. Disk Utility showed that there were no snapshots taking up space. There must be real files but not ones that the app could see.
I relaunched OmniDiskSweeper using sudo, and it found a huge amount of stuff hidden in the root account: /private/var/root.
I had thought that wasn’t really used except when running Terminal from macOS Recovery. But apparently various daemons store all kinds of stuff there now. The /private/var/root/Library/Logs folder alone was using 74 GB, and there were also several multi-GB cache folders.
The logs were almost entirely from RTCReporting, and I’m not the only one to run into this.
I deleted the files using OmniDiskSweeper, but that didn’t help. It turns out that by default it moves files to the trash, and I guess since it was running under sudo this meant the invisible trash folder for the root account. It’s better to hold down the Option key to Delete Immediately.
After deleting the files and restarting the Mac, the free space looked right at first but then steadily dropped. Pretty soon there were again 5 GB of RTCReporting logs with the Mac just sitting there. I started using sudo du -h -d 2 /private/var/root/ to track how the sizes were changing. Within a day it was back up to 27 GB.
Activity Monitor showed that rtcreportingd and fileproviderd were each using almost 100% CPU constantly. I immediately suspected Dropbox because it had been working poorly on this Mac for a year or so. It wouldn’t keep files offline and constantly seemed to be syncing even when files weren’t changing. Sure enough, turning off Dropbox stopped the CPU use and the ballooning log files.
This was our last Mac still using Dropbox, so it seemed time to migrate it to iCloud Drive. The syncing problems ended up not being limited to keeping files offline. It couldn’t even reliably download most of them from the cloud to move them out of the Dropbox folder, instead reporting I/O errors for most files. And the files that I did move to the Documents folder never synced that deletion up to the cloud. I ended up just downloading the whole folder from the Web interface. iCloud Drive uploaded everything quickly and then settled into a state of no CPU use.
Previously:
Bug Dropbox File Provider Extensions iCloud Drive Mac macOS 15 Sequoia OmniDiskSweeper Storage
Joe Rossignol:
After years of holding out, Walmart today announced that it will finally begin accepting tap-to-pay options like Apple Pay in some of its Walmart and Sam’s Club stores in the U.S. starting Monday, August 24. The retailer plans to roll out tap-to-pay support to all of its U.S. stores by the end of 2026 and to its gas stations by mid-2027.
Previously:
Apple Pay Business iOS iOS 26 Payments Walmart
Rui Carmo:
Apple Mail is the first app open every day and the one I find hardest to defend, and I’ve been defending it for twenty years (longer if you remember the original NeXT mail client).
The broader story is one of abandonment.
[…]
Apple deprecated that API, replaced it with a (much more restrictive) MailKit surface in 2021, and proceeded to lock MailKit down so hard that barely anyone shipped an extension.
[…]
In particular, in this age of desktop AI agents, I come time and again across the fact that AppleScript support in Mail has been left to rot.
[…]
And searching for messages is such a mockery of a user experience that I’m not even sure how to describe it[…]
Watts Martin:
The last email program I truly loved was Bare Bones’ Mailsmith.
[…]
Now, I’ve tried a lot, like, a lot, of “modern” email clients. The built-in Apple email client is extremely straightforward, but underpowered. Thunderbird is too lumbering and heavyweight for what I want. Hipster ones like Spark are pretty, but focus on things I don’t care about. Mimestream is solid, but it’s Gmail-only. Microsoft Outlook is, unfortunately, Microsoft Outlook. MailMate is nerdy and, in some ways, the most obvious spiritual descendant of Mailsmith, but I find some of its UX inscrutable. Yes, I am aware of the irony of saying this just before describing an Emacs-based client.
And increasingly, commercial email clients are expensive and/or subscription-only.
Nick Heer:
I almost never use Mail on iOS 26. I just tried to insert an image from my photo library, and I could not figure out how to get back to seeing a keyboard. What a bizarre workflow. Still shocked some of this stuff shipped.
Rosyna Keller:
I haven’t been able to use Mail on macOS since macOS 15.4. It hangs on launch if any accounts are enabled. It feels like it’s been so many years since I filed feedback with sample logs and still Apple hasn’t fixed the hang.
Helge Heß:
I wonder whether I will ever see a time where Mail clients report accurate unread counts (spoiler: clicking on Inbox shows no new mall)
Well, I guess most other mail clients, Thunderbird or Outlook, get this right. But it never worked in any of the Apple mail clients. Like for decades now 🙃
Rishi Ó summarizes the promises for Mail later this year:
Juli Clover:
iOS 27 has an overhauled search system that extends to the Mail app. Instead of surfacing results based on keywords and recency, Mail app search ranks results by relevance and intent.
I never found the problem to be relevance ranking but rather that it simply didn’t find certain messages at all.
Long press on any email and you can ask Siri to summarize, find an item in the email, track a package, get a flight number, save a photo, and more.
I guess that’s fine, but as Carmo notes there’s just a whole list of basics that need attention in iOS Mail.
Messages in Mail load faster, search indexing is more reliable, and unread badges between platforms like iOS and macOS sync more reliably.
Rayn Jones:
Mail search is still garbage in iOS 27. 😞 It’s just not better like they claim.
Previously:
Apple Mail AppleScript E-mail Client iOS iOS 26 Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 Mail App Extensions MobileMail Search
