Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
• Drafts behave differently. When you compose a message in a regular IMAP ac-
count, Mail automatically saves a copy in your Drafts mailbox every 30 seconds
as well as whenever you manually click Save as Draft. Each time a new draft is
saved, Mail deletes any previous draft of that message (without moving it to a
Trash mailbox), so you see only one draft in your Drafts mailbox.
When you compose a message in your Gmail account, Mail still saves a draft
every 30 seconds, and still deletes any previous draft. However, instead of pre-
vious drafts disappearing altogether, they show up in your Trash mailbox. As a
result, if you spend 10 minutes writing a message in your Gmail account in Mail,
you could see 20 drafts of that message in your Trash mailbox! This behavior
isn't harmful—just empty your Trash every so often, or set up automatic Trash
emptying (in Mail > Preferences > Accounts > Account Name > Mailbox Behavi-
ors, choose anything other than Never from the Permanently Erase Deleted Mes-
sages When pop-up menu).
Set Up Mail to Use Gmail
Back in 2009, I wrote an article for TidBITS that turned out to be wildly popular:
Achieving
Email Bliss with IMAP, Gmail, and Apple Mail
.
It explained Gmail's nonstandard way of
dealing with IMAP and how that didn't work well with the version of Mail in use at the time.
Then it detailed 21 nitpicky steps one could follow to eliminate or work around most of those
problems, achieving a workable compromise between Gmail's way of doing things and Mail's
way. Based on the voluminous feedback I've received about that article (and about similar
steps I included in several of my earlier topics on Apple Mail), that procedure seems to have
helped a lot of people.
When Mavericks was first released, Mail had some appalling bugs that made Gmail almost
completely unusable for anyone who had followed those steps (which, remember, were previ-
ously the way to
prevent
misbehavior). In later updates, Apple fixed a number of bugs so that
people who had changed their Gmail settings in the way I suggested wouldn't suffer (much).
Be that as it may, the way Mail in Mavericks handles Gmail accounts is so much different
from Mail in earlier versions of Mac OS X that, for all practical purposes, those 21 steps to
“bliss” are now irrelevant. In fact, you'll now get the
best
results in Mail if you leave most of
Gmail's settings at their defaults!
In short, if you read that article, or one of my earlier topics on Mail, and made a bunch of
changes to your Gmail configuration so that it would work better with older versions of Mail,
you should consider undoing some of those changes now. I explain how just ahead. If you
haven't made any changes to your Gmail setup yet, account setup is quite simple.
