Tip for maximizing internal memory

Those of you who have been using your phone for a while will already know about this but the Desire User Guide doesn't cover the subject so I thought I'd post this for new users.

If you use the standard Mail app (not the Gmail one) every email that you delete goes into your Trash folder and uses up internal memory. If you don't empty your Trash folder regularly you'll wonder why you're running out of memory faster than you expected. I've just done an experiment by not emptying my Trash for several days. My internal memory went down to just over 17 MB. When I went to empty the Trash I found over 700 emails and deleting them brought the internal memory back to over 27 MB. Quite a difference.

To empty the Trash, run the Mail app then press the Menu key and select Folders and then select Trash. Press the Menu key again and select Delete. Press the Menu key again and select Mark All. Now press the Delete button.

If you've got more than one mail account, tap the bar at the top that shows the server name, then select the other account(s) from the drop-down menu. This way you can delete all of the old emails as each account has a separate Trash folder.

You can, of course, leave it until you get a "low on space" notification. Now you know your first port of call when you get it.

EDIT: Note that the above advice is for those who download their email using POP protocol. If you get your mail by connecting to an MS Exchange server, DO NOT follow the above advice as doing so will most likely delete the entire contents of your Trash folder. Of course, this might be acceptable, but I've added this warning after advice from a couple of forum posters.

Can I ask why you choose to use the mail client to get you pop mail rather than having your GMail account pick it up?

My Gmail account is for email that I want to receive: mail from friends and family, official mail, individuals and businesses that are in my personal contact list. My other email accounts are for all of the junk including spam, email from businesses I no longer have any relationship with, and email from people and businesses that I have a short-term relationship with. I don't want any of this latter type of mail going anywhere near my important mail. Especially since Gmail archives my email and it would take far too long going through it pruning out the junk. Better to download it into a set of junk folders and delete it from the server.

There are two mail apps pre-loaded from what I can see: the Mail App and the Gmail one. Currently, they're both connected to the same gmail account. Is there a way to disable one of them? Do both of them download mail messages? If so, that means both are eating up space for redundant info, so 'd like only one of them to work. I'm new at this so sorry if the question sounds noobish

@ garryknight:

Thanks for this! Was able to delete the Mail account with your help Thanks again

I've now modified my original post to include a warning for MS Exchange users. As I said earlier, the advice I gave only affects your Trash folder, and while it will most likely delete All mail from your Trash folder, it will most likely make absolutely no difference to the amount of available memory on your mobile phone.

Still like the Desire for its compact size and for its optical trackball function that I dearly miss in all other, later models HTC released since, and in the Samsung smartphones as well... especially when positioning the cursor somewhere in a text field when editing a piece of writing the optical trackball is a superior tool (compared to the clumsy arrows, that are especially hopeless when one needs to select a piece of text bigger than just one screen) and I still am dearly missing it on for instance my two Galaxy phones to date.
About the little internal memory there Desire has and how to free some MBs, a very helpful app downloadable in Android Market for that is Android System Info by ElectricSheep. Once opened, under 'Apps' it makes visible like no other EVERYTHING that is installed in the internal memory, and when you tap on one of the big memory occupiers, it will SPECIFY what part of the amount of consumed MBs is actually the app itself and what part its 'data' (bits it has captured along the road). And indeed, here might show some big surprises. I recently were forced to sanitize my internal memory this way, it suddenly having shrunken to a mere 12 MBs - at which level 'Maps' will seize to zoom or function altogether for instance, and nothing will upgrade anymore. I found that the mail fn held more than 11 MBs, all data, no embodiment of the app itself (once deleted, there were no noticeable change in Mail, it were functioning still normal as before and even still had all the folders). I suppose this cleanup was basically the same as the procedure described (above) will enable.  Even a bigger surprise I think was finding that there was a function called 'Internet' (not  browser, not Google Search) that itself is zero bits, but also held over 12 MBs in data!

Is there a way to disable one of them? They download the mail? If so, which means that all eat the excess space, and therefore would like just one of them work.