Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
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Labels vs. mailboxes:
On the Gmail Web site, you can apply descriptive labels
to each message to help you find messages with particular labels later—but the
Web interface has no mailboxes or folders. For example, your Inbox is simply a
view that shows all messages with the Inbox label; any of those messages might
also have one or more additional labels you've applied, such as Work and Project
A. Mail, by contrast, follows the traditional model in which messages are filed
rather than tagged; messages are treated more like discrete files, so a given mes-
sage normally exists in only one mailbox. When you access Gmail with an IMAP
client such as Mail, Gmail's labels are translated into mailboxes. The result is
that if a message has three labels on the Gmail Web site, it appears in three mail-
boxes in Mail.
Prior to Mavericks, Mail would download and store an extra copy of each mes-
sage that has multiple labels. This is no longer the case in Mavericks. Instead,
Mail now stores just one copy and invisibly tags it with the names of all the
other mailboxes in which it should appear. That saves space and bandwidth, but
there's still no
convenient
way to apply multiple Gmail labels to a single message
in Mail. (The inconvenient way is to hold down the Option key while dragging a
message to each of several mailboxes.)
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Conversations:
Gmail shows all the messages in a conversation—a related
series of exchanges between you and one or more other people—together in a
single “stack,” known as a
thread,
regardless of how you've labeled the individu-
al messages. Mail can do something similar, as long as View > Organize by Con-
versation is checked for the currently selected mailbox, but Mail and Gmail have
somewhat different ideas of what constitutes a conversation, so you may not see
exactly the same set of messages in both places.
•
Archiving:
In Gmail, you can
archive
a message, which removes its Inbox label
and thus removes the message from your Inbox (but doesn't explicitly put it an
another mailbox—remember, there aren't any!). Archived messages, along with
all your other messages, appear when you click the All Mail link on Gmail's Web
site, so the All Mail category serves as a giant storage area for all your stored (and
sent) messages, even if you haven't bothered to label them.
Prior to Mavericks, Mail didn't work well with Gmail's method of archiving; if
you selected a message and chose Mail's Archive command, it moved the mes-
sage to a mailbox/label called Archive, which is not at all the same thing. Now,
Mail handles archiving for Gmail accounts the way Gmail does, and displays a
special mailbox for Gmail accounts (see
Special Mailboxes
)
called Archive (All
Mail), which should show you the same collection of messages you see when you
