Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Cached Messages
Mail in Mavericks keeps local copies of all retrieved messages from server-based ac-
counts. That means the messages are available even if your Mac is offline—and you
have a local backup (of sorts) in case anything should go wrong on the server.
In previous versions of Mail, you could opt not to cache all your messages locally, but
that's no longer the case. Your only option is whether to Automatically Download All
Attachments—but whether this is enabled or not (in Mail > Preferences > Accounts >
Account Name
> Advanced), once you've downloaded an attachment manually, Mail
caches that along with the rest of the message.
Mail keeps your local cache synchronized with the server copies of your messages
automatically in the background. If things go out of whack for any reason, you can
force an immediate synchronization by choosing Mailbox > Synchronize >
Account
Name
.
Special Mailboxes
A number of mailboxes that appear in most accounts—Inbox, Drafts, Sent, Junk, Trash, and
(sometimes) Archive—are shown under the MAILBOXES heading in Mail's sidebar. They
have distinctive icons and behave differently from other mailboxes; I refer to these as “spe-
cial” mailboxes (
Figure 1
).
