Cache Folder
Eudora Tip #167/91-Feb-2003

Recent Tips have sent you to your Eudora Folder with its settings and mailboxes etc. While there you will have noticed the Cache Folder. Mine currently has 65 items — 22 from 3 December, and then several other groups of about 10 from 4 or 5 other dates.

All the files are gifs, jpgs, or pngs — pictures in other words, and each “group” shares the first part of its name in common. Here’s one example from 5 dated 8 February:

www.mac.com/5EB4058A.gif

Now, if I search for messages from that date I find that Apple Computer emailed me about my trial .Mac membership. I open that message and can easily see that it contains 2 graphics. If I use the Blah Blah Blah button though Tip #50/06-Sept-2000 and look at the HTML coding I can see that in fact there are 5 graphics linked from the message back to Apple’s web servers. A couple are just spacers and are “invisible” in the body of the message.

So, here’s what happened. Apple composed a message which linked to some pictures. They used HTML to do this (that’s what web pages are made of). When I opened the message my computer connected to their web servers and downloaded the graphics. These were then stored in the Cache Folder. Now every time I view that message it will show me the pretty pictures, whether or not I’m connected to the Internet. If I am connected then it will fetch fresh copies; if not then it will just use the stored graphics.

If I delete the pictures from the Cache Folder and open the message again, then again my computer connects to the server and downloads a whole fresh batch of graphics.

Should you delete these files? Well, wait till next week for more of the story first.