Mail.app in Mavericks wants to download ALL email, making it useless for people with large amounts of email

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Mail.app in Mavericks wants to download ALL email, making it useless for people with large amounts of email

I was running Mountain Lion, and in Mail.app I had "Keep copies of messages for offline viewing" set to "Don't keep copies of any messages". It was working fine.

Today when I upgraded to Mavericks, it said "To use the new features in Mail, your Mail messages need to be downloaded to this computer. Click Continue to download your messages now, or click Quit to download later." You'll notice it didn't give me an option to say no, don't download the messages; the only other option was Quit.

I have too much mail for this to be possible. Many hundreds of thousands of emails across dozens of folders. I let it start trying to download them all anyway, but it got bogged down at about the halfway mark (as I expected it would). I quite simply have too much mail for all of it to be downloaded.

I want the old Mountain Lion behavior where it only downloads the headers, not the messages themselves (unless I click on a message). But when I look in the preferences for the Mavericks version, that option is no longer there in the available preferences.

This is a showstopper. This is probably going to mean that I'm going to have to downgrade back to Mountain Lion.

:-(

Posted on Oct 22, 2013 5:37 PM

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Answer 1

Jun 13, 2014 3:39 AM in response to tamwuff

This problem is slowly killing my machine! I 'upgraded' to a better spec machine so I could synch my phone would you believe it. I couldn't synch my phone and my laptop with a cable, that was fankly incredible.

Now I have a new machine and first thing I did was install mavericks, and now mac mail spends all it's time dowloading mail from may mail accounts. I have 4 imap gmail accounts set up and mail is using 56GB on my local disc to store them.

There use to be an option to limit the disc storage I think 5GB would be quite enough to hald the last few months email locally. Question is how do I set that limit in mavericks. Is there some plist I can edit or something.

Looking at the activity window it seems to spend A LOT of time

"updating cache directory"

I don't think I even have 56GB staore on the server, so how is it possible that I have more on the local copy?

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