Sync Apple Mail in iCloud - Manual mail download

[OSXphoto]

Hello all,

How do I get Apple Mail to fetch all messages at once from an iCloud mailbox? Let me explain:

I have used Apple Mail since OSX Tiger, when I switched to Apple in 2007. Keeping my inbox tidy involved deleting messages that I did not need anymore and moving important messages to a mailbox structure „On My Mac”. From here on I’ll call it „important mailboxes structure”.

This has worked very well as long as I owned only one Mac. Now I have three and I regularly feel the need to access some of my archived emails from another Mac. I have:
- Macbook Pro Late 2013 15” [OSX 10.9] - My do-it-all and take-everywhere machine
- Macbook Late 2008 [OSX 10.9] - Family’s email, Word processing and movie watching machine
- Mac Pro Late 2010 [OSX 10.8] - Used only for photography and incidental emailing clients

So I decided to move the „important mailboxes structure” to iCloud. I figured that if I have iCloud set up on all Macs and sync „Mail”, it would build the entire „important mailboxes structure” on the other two Macs.

I followed the following steps:
#1 The „important mailboxes structure” used to reside on the old 2008 Macbook (then it was still on OSX 10.8).
#2 I moved the „important mailboxes structure” to a folder on iCloud.
#3 On the 2013 rMBP, I went through all folders and counted the emails, compared them to those on the 2008 Macbook, to make sure all emails landed in iCloud correctly.
#4 I wiped the 2008 Macbook and installed OSX 10.9.
#5 On the 2008 Macbook, I logged on using my AppleID and set up iCloud, including „Mail”.

Well this has worked to some degree. The other two Macs do have the structure, but the individual email messages are not copied over out of their own.

Problem: On the other 2 Macs, I need to click on each individual folder in the „important mailboxes structure” in order to get the emails in that folder to download from the iCloud server. Also, when I move a new message to the „important mailboxes structure” from one of the other two Macs, I’ll need to click to the respective folder and wait some time for it to download to that machine. Until I do this, that email message won’t show up in any search (Mail, Spotlight).

I have - of course - tried to right-click on the iCloud mail account in Apple Mail and selected „Sync iCloud” many times. It will be busy for 10 minutes, but it won’t download all individual emails from the iCloud server. Do I need to change some setting?

Any suggestions are very welcome!

Thanks!