So let's look in the Mac Mail app at a set of preferences called Mailbox Behaviors.
Now these are settings that are specific to the accounts you're using.
You're going to get different options, different features, depending upon what service you
use.
I've talked many times before how we should all abandon ISP email.
It's old, antiquated, and has lots of problems, and use modern services like gmail and iCloud.
So I'm going to show gmail and iCloud today.
If you're using some older system from your ISP or something like that you're going to
get different behaviors and things are going to work a little differently.
Let's take a look at where these are.
These are part of the accounts you have setup.
So you're going to go to Mail but you're not going to go to Accounts.
That's going to take you into System Preferences looking at your internet accounts.
Instead you want to go to Mail Preferences.
In Mail Preferences you also have a tab here for Accounts.
Then you have each account listed.
So I have two accounts here.
An iCloud account and a gmail account.
Now when you have one selected you should see Account Information, Mailbox Behaviors,
and Server Settings.
What you see for each one of these is going to be different if you're not using iCloud
or gmail.
It could be vastly different actually.
So we're going to look at Mailbox Behaviors here for iCloud.
Notice that it's broken up into five different sections here having to do with Drafts, Sent
Mail, Junk Mail, Trash, and Archive.
These loosely correspond to different places that your mail can go.
So let's take a look at these.
We've got, up here in the Menu Bar, we have an Archive button right here, we have a Trash
button, we have a Junk Mail button as well.
What you're missing there are the Drafts button which is the ability to kind of save a draft
as you're composing an email and it will save a temporary copy of it every once in a while
or you can opt to close the email you're composing and get back to it later.
Also, of course, you've got the Sent folder which is what happens after you send an email,
what happens to your copy of that message.
So going back into Mail Preferences, Accounts, Mailbox Behaviors we see, for instance, for
the Junk mailbox we can select which one to use now.
Here, for iCloud, notice that I have two options.
One is to save it in the Junk mail for iCloud.
The other is to do it on my Mac.
If I switch to On My Mac what will happen is a piece of the junk email will be taken
off of the iCloud server, will be put into a local folder here on this Mac.
Anytime you do that you're creating problems if you're using multiple devices.
Which most of us are.
If you're using an iPhone and a Mac, for instance, or maybe an iPhone, an iPad, desktop Mac,
and a laptop Mac you want everything to be in sync.
So you want to keep all your email on the server as much as possible.
So it's probably not a good option for anything to use On My Mac.
Stick to the regular Junk email folder.
Now for lots of services like gmail, when you select that and go to gmail spam, you're
actually doing the same thing you would do if you would go into gmail, the website, and
you would hit the Junk mail button there.
Not only does it move it to that folder so it gets it out of your way but it also sends
a signal to Goggle that this is junk mail.
When enough people do that it helps them refine their spam filters.
So if somebody spams like a million people one morning the first one hundred are marked
as spam by the first one hundred people that read it, you may never actually even see that
email because it says well all one million of these must be junk.
So you definitely want to stick to the server side version of that.
I suspect that Apple may do the same kind of thing.
As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure they do.
So sticking to iCloud Junk helps send a signal to Apple that the server that it's sending
from is bad and that the email itself is bad, all of that.
Now you've got a similar thing here with Trash.
You can go and have the trash go to Deleted Messages in iCloud or on your Mac.
Here on Goggle you can have it go to a specific folder you've created.
These are actually called Labels in gmail for those that are familiar with gmail or
you can use the gmail trash as opposed to a local trash.
This is very important because if you say throw something in the trash here on this
Mac and then later on you want to actually retrieve when you're on another Mac you won't
find it there if you put it in On My Mac.
So just using the server for that.
Archive, this is where it's critically important.
Notice here for gmail it doesn't even give an option here.
It wants to go into the All Mail folder which basically means it removes the inbox label
from that message.
For iCloud it also just goes into the iCloud Archive folder.
You know for years and years now email services like Goggle and Apple have just encouraged
us to just simply archive all of our email.
Never delete it.
I know a lot of people are still in the habit of wanting to delete emails that they're finished
with.
But I haven't deleted an email for more than a decade.
Well except for maybe a piece of spam or something like that.
I archive all my email.
You have tons of server space.
Emails take up very little space on the server.
For the most part you can just keep archiving emails for the rest of your life and never
run out of space.
As I say, I've been doing it for ten, maybe more, years with gmail.
I have tons of archived emails.
It's great.
Sometimes I go back and I search for an email that was ten years ago and I thought I'd never
need it again.
But there was something in it I needed.
I only had it because I decided to archive all my emails instead of just some of it that
I selected.
So for Drafts you have the same kind of thing where drafts will be saved.
Very useful to save to iCloud or to have it be on the gmail server because then you can
pick up on that draft later on.
Also, the same thing for Sent.
If you do it local On My Mac then you may not have access to it where you want it later
on on another device.
So look through these settings.
My recommendation is to use all the server site stuff if you're using iCloud and gmail.
You also have some other settings in here like When to Erase Junk Mail Messages.
So messages that go into junk mail.
You can say Automatically get rid of them after a month, or When quitting email, or
Never.
On my regular accounts I think I have it set for a month.
These are just test accounts.
The same thing for deleted messages.
When do they leave the trash and actually get deleted forever.
You can set it up here as well.
Space is usually not an issue with services so set it after one month or even never sometimes
is fine and then doing it manually when you want to.
So go and check your Mailbox Behaviors for your email accounts and make sure things are
setup like you want.