How to uninstall Mailspring on Mac

Your mail lives on your mail provider's servers. Mailspring keeps a local cache of your mailboxes plus its settings in ~/Library/Application Support/Mailspring, and Mailspring's support article says that deleting this folder resets the app: you sign in to your Mailspring ID and connect your accounts again. What does not come back from the server is anything that only ever existed on this Mac. This guide covers Mailspring from its official download and from the Homebrew cask mailspring.

Save what only exists locally

  • Signatures and templates stay on this Mac. Mailspring's source keeps signatures in its settings (signature store) and templates in a templates folder (template store), both inside ~/Library/Application Support/Mailspring, and syncing them is still an open feature request on the Mailspring forum. Copy the templates folder and the text of any signature you want to keep.
  • Send or copy drafts you still need. Drafts that were never saved to your mail server's Drafts folder exist only in the local cache.
  • Make sure you can still sign in to each mail account and to your Mailspring ID. You will need them on a new install.

Removing the app does not cancel Mailspring Pro or delete your Mailspring ID, and it does not delete any mail from your accounts.

Quit Mailspring and remove the app

  1. Quit Mailspring from the Mailspring menu. Closing the window is not enough. In the recorded test it ran eight processes, which Mole's Status page folded into one Mailspring row.
  2. Search Activity Monitor for Mailspring and check that its processes have exited.
  3. Move Mailspring from Finder's Applications folder to the Trash.
  4. Open System Settings › General › Login Items & Extensions. In the recorded test Mailspring added itself to Open at Login on its first launch. If it is still listed after the app is gone, remove it there.

Where Mailspring keeps its data

Location What it holds What to do
~/Library/Application Support/Mailspring Mail cache, account settings, signatures and templates Remove once local-only items are saved; it rebuilds from your servers on a new install
~/Library/Caches/com.mailspring.mailspring and ~/Library/Caches/com.mailspring.mailspring.ShipIt App and updater caches Remove with the app
~/Library/Logs/Mailspring App logs Remove with the app
~/Library/Preferences/com.mailspring.mailspring.plist App preferences Remove with the app

Check the result

pgrep -il mailspring
ls -d "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Mailspring"
  • No output from pgrep means Mailspring is not running.
  • ls -d printing the path means the mail cache and settings folder is still there, which is expected if you kept it for a reinstall. "No such file or directory" means it is gone.

If you installed it with Homebrew

The mailspring cask's zap list is ~/Library/Application Support/Mailspring, ~/Library/Logs/Mailspring, and everything named com.mailspring.* under ~/Library/Caches, ~/Library/Preferences and ~/Library/Saved Application State. brew uninstall --cask --zap mailspring moves all of it to the Trash, signatures and templates included. To remove only the app:

brew uninstall --cask mailspring

Mole adds --zap only when every path on the zap list sits inside ~/Library, none of them touches a row you left unchecked, and no other installed app claims them. ~/Library/Application Support/Mailspring is listed but not selected by default, so Mole leaves --zap out unless you tick that row.

What Mole lists

For Mailspring from the official download:

  • ~/Library/Application Support/Mailspring is listed but not selected. The cache folders inside it (Cache, Code Cache, GPUCache, DawnGraphiteCache, DawnWebGPUCache, blob_storage) and its Crashpad folder are separate rows selected by default.
  • The app and updater caches, HTTP storage, the preferences file, the recent-documents list and the temporary caches filed under com.mailspring.mailspring are selected by default.
  • Mail on your servers is not on this Mac and is not listed.

What this test covered

On September 26, 2026, Mailspring 1.25.0 was installed from its official zip, opened once without signing in, and uninstalled with a development build of Mole with every row ticked. Status showed one Mailspring row with eight processes using about 437 MB. On first launch Mailspring added a login item; after the uninstall it was gone. Sixteen items went to the Trash, including ~/Library/Application Support/Mailspring (2.5 MB), and nothing from the list was left on disk. Earlier, on September 21, 2026, the same version was removed the same way with the same result. Mail accounts, a Mailspring ID, Mailspring Pro and a Homebrew install were not tested.