Abstract: A method for efficiently updating and displaying the hierarchy of a remote data store and displaying subfolder indicia indicating that child folders contain at least one subfolder. When a user expands a folder, an e-mail client displays a cached list of the expanded folder's contents. After the cached data is displayed, a list of the expanded folder's child folders and a list of the subfolders contained in the child folders are retrieved from the remote mail server. The retrieved data is sorted and compared to the cached list, and the cached data is updated to reflect the correct child folders and whether the child folders contain subfolders. The displayed hierarchy is then updated to reflect the state of the data that was retrieved from the server.