Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
saved messages to display in plain text, if available; you could toggle between dif-
ferent formats using commands on the View > Message submenu. Unfortunately
for lovers of plain text (like me), that Terminal command no longer works, and
the options to switch among message formats are gone.
•
No more buddy status:
Before Mavericks, Mail could optionally display a
colored dot indicating whether people in your Messages instant messaging ac-
counts (such as AIM) were online. That feature is gone, along with its associated
preference and menu command. I presume this is due to the fact that Apple ex-
pects most users to favor iMessage over older instant messaging protocols—and
iMessage doesn't care about “online” status.
•
IMAP caching:
In previous versions of Mail, you could choose, for IMAP ac-
counts, whether to download and cache full messages including attachments,
only message text, only read messages, or none of the above. Unfortunately, in
Mavericks, downloading the full text of every message is mandatory for IMAP
accounts. You can opt to skip attachments, but that's it.
•
Gmail differences:
Mail now handles Gmail accounts much differently than
before. As I detailed in my TidBITS article
Mail in Mavericks Changes the Gmail
Equation
and followed up on in
Mail in Mavericks: Is It Safe Yet?
, Apple was
undoubtedly well-intentioned—and indeed, some of the changes are quite posit-
ive—but the devil is in the details.
Here are a few of them:
▪
No more duplicates:
In earlier versions of Mail, if you left all your
Gmail settings at their defaults, Mail would download at least two
copies of each message—one in the All Mail mailbox and one for
each label you'd applied in Gmail (since labels in Gmail are trans-
lated into mailboxes in Mail when you use IMAP). That made for
lots of duplicate messages, wasting bandwidth and disk space. Now,
Mail downloads just one copy of each message (the one in All Mail),
and invisibly “tags” each message to indicate which other mail-
box(es), if any, it should also appear in. That's a better approach,
and it means there's no longer any need, using settings on the Gmail
Web site, to hide the All Mail label from IMAP clients (unless that's
essential for another IMAP client you also use)—and in fact, Mail in
Mavericks appears to work better if All Mail is enabled.
▪
Gmail-like archiving:
Speaking of All Mail, the Archive mailbox
in Mail's sidebar for Gmail accounts now shows All Mail—that is,
what you'd see if you clicked All Mail on the Gmail Web site. And
