I'm a college student and a student employee at my college's IT office. We recently upgraded to Google Apps for Education for our college email, and we also have a high proportion of Mac users on campus (students, faculty, staff, and administrators).
My manager in IT pointed out that since Mavericks came out, it seems as though Mail.app is automatically downloading the entirety of all messages from the server for caching purposes so Spotlight can search them instantly. For normal users, I'd imagine this is fine. We have some institutional users with 20+ years of email (hundreds of thousands of messages), and this new feature of Mac Mail is slowing their computers down significantly. My manager said that Mail.app previously just downloaded message headers, but now it's downloading full text and attachments. From searching this topic on AskDifferent, I know that it's possible to turn off auto-downloading of attachments by going to Preferences>Accounts>Advanced> and unchecking "Automatically download attachments."
Is there a way to turn off the auto-downloading of full message text as well, and force Mail.app to only download headers of archived mail?