in one embodiment such reaping is transparent to the user in that a user can access any of his her mailbox items from user device 240 a 240 n regardless of whether or not it is on the user cache 340 a 340 n this is done in one embodiment by communicating with the on demand fetcher 390 which fetches from the data store 215 on the collaboration suite server 210 any mailbox item requested by a user which has been reaped from the user cache 340 a 340 n this is described in greater detail below with reference to fig4 the mapi translator 390 translates commands etc to and from mapi prior to communication with the collaboration suite server 210 the functionality of the various modules shown in fig3 is described in greater detail below with reference to fig4 fig4 is a flowchart which outlines some of the steps taken by a system in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention an initial filtered synchronization step 410 is performed between the collaboration suite server 210 and the caches 340 this initial filtered synchronization is discussed further below some or all of the data in the data store 215 for user n needs to be synchronized with the cache 340 n in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention the initial synchronization of the user n 39 s data in data store 215 with the cache 340 n is filtered all of the data for user n in the data store 215 is not synchronized with the cache 340 n instead a subset of the data in the user 39 s mailbox is synchronized with the cache 340 n in one embodiment the filters relating to what data should be downloaded onto the.