Apple Acknowledges Continuing Issues with OS X Mail, Offers Manual Workaround

[RomoUa7]

First of all, you woke up a thread from 2014 which perhaps isn't so bad because you're still running... Snow Leopard? Anyway, I gave up on mail.app many months (years?) ago. I ran airmail for a while then gave up on that. I now do email in my browser (Chrome). I suggest you go to Apple's feedback page. I have reason to believe it's not connected to a toilet or shredder like feedback intended for Google or Microsoft, if you can even figure out how to leave feedback for those companies.




I grow VERY tired of problems with my iThings and Apple gear in general. But it would take a LOT of crap for me to go back to the minefield that is all things Windows.

First I'll mention the Apple things I'm not thrilled about:

1) VERY difficult to upgrade rMBP, VERY difficult to upgrade 5K iMac. These two things mean I must pay the "Apple tax" for RAM and SSD. Well I suppose I could get the minimum SSD, just enough for the OS and put all my stuff on a USB3, Firewire, or Thunderbolt external drive. But then if I want to grab my rMBP and go work on something, chances are my stuff isn't with me.

2) Then there's the lack of cellular radio in Apple computers. If you're gonna limit me to iPad-like storage then at least give me a cellular radio so I can get to iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive or another cloud of my choice.

3) Dumbing down of OSX apps. This applies mostly to mail.app but I also completely gave up on all things airport when airport utility became so doggone useless Apple actually supported keeping an older version installed in parallel. Utter nonsense.

4) No save as. Who came up with this nonsense? Duplicate, then save? Then by default it wants to save to iCloud instead of the folder where I opened the original file. I thought only Windows was designed for this level of click-harvesting.

Now I'll mention just a few of the things that keep me using Apple products:

1) Stellar customer support. Try to get somebody from Microsoft or Google on the phone. Really. Try it. Good Luck!!

2) Outstanding build quality. Granted Lenovo makes some sweet ultrabooks and Microsoft's surface 4 is a serious contender, Apple has been making great products with excellent build quality for much longer and keeping a consistently high standard. There have been a few speed bumps along the way but overall I'm satisfied with my Apple gear.

3) Well thought out software, (mostly). This is a double edged sword. Just as I get annoyed with the dumbing down of apps above, more often than not Apple picks the most logical stuff to hide or leave out altogether making their products more like "data toasters" than computers that require my undivided attention to make complex decisions the OS should have already handled for me like printing landscape oriented pages on landscape oriented paper (duh).

Have you taken a look at the control panel in Windows lately? It took until windows TEN for Microsoft to finally get rid of the last few dialogs that have been around since Windows 3.1. That's the equivalent of Apple still using dialogs that not only pre-date OSX but go all the way back to System 7 (1992!). Apple went through 2 revolutions: From Mac OS to OSX (2001) and from PPC architecture to Intel architecture (2005) and then OSX became LESS bloated (starting with Snow Leopard) while all things Windows stagnated and became more bloated than ever though admittedly more stable. Just for reference, my Win 7 Enterprise laptop at work requires a press-and-hold-power-reset twice or more a WEEK. This is largely due to crippleware installed by our IT department but it is still not a good reflection on Windows.

4) The app store. With only one exception, the malware that infected WeChat and other apps built in China using a bootleg version of Xcode, the app store has been a safe, rock-solid place to get apps. No wading through web sites for apps that might or might not work as advertised and more problematically might bring along a little something extra I do NOT need. Gatekeeper is also a blessing so you can adjust your security settings to allow apps from elsewhere but still require apps that are signed by known developers.

5) Industrial design. iPhone, iPad, iMac, Mac mini, and all flavors of Macbooks benefit from world-class industrial design. They are attractive to look at. No stoopid optical drives to pop out unexpectedly, no lousy trackpads that are more dust collectors than practical ways to move the pointer. The one exception is the base Macbook which requires an unsightly dongle to do more than one thing at a time through it's SINGLE USB port. I guess it's elegant if whatever you're doing fits inside the paltry storage that comes with it and you're in range of good wifi for everything else, but Apple really should have put one or two more ports on the thing.

6) Resale. I bought an HP laptop for my daughter in high school. It ware required for freshmen and it cost $2400. It was an HP "Elite"book. It was more of a "Junk"book. Around the same time I bought an iPad 1. Two years later, the school switched to iPad. They offered to buy back the laptops... for $52. Meanwhile at the time my lowly iPad 1 was still worth $350. This is generally the case across all of Apple's product line. Try to sell a used Galaxy S4 or a Lenovo or Dell. Look at those ads alongside an iPhone 5S or a Macbook Air of the same vintage. Look at the purchase to resale ratio. No comparison. This is not only because of Apple's reputation but also because Apple products (mostly) don't suck.

I can identify with every user on here who is fed up with the steady dumbing down of apps and features being drained away from Apple apps but I'm not nearly ready to walk back to (what I consider to be) the pile of stinking dung that is everything Windows.

Well your right when it comes to the selling differences,from apple products to other contenders,value goes down way down while apple products stay at reasonable high rates.even with fair far use one can still sell it for a good price,.

 

[campyguy]

It's not a problem with running Maverick's, I have snow leopard, after doing some extensive research on why I can't set up a Gmail on mac computers, it was simply I had to disable step 2 verification, and soon after I set up a Gmail account on both my macs.And it worked,well the next day ,I can get my mail to go on line,hours and nada........I gave up...This is the what we get after buy en expensive macbook pro,or so for featuresnot to work or apps to fail....I knew I should of bought another PC..apple suck I could proudly say that and I would say it to there face not that it would matter for them long ad the money smells food to them.

Ditto on dredging up this thread for IMHO a generally unrelated matter for what amounts to a rant. I used to use Gmail and Google Apps but tired of the ever-changing back end - the almost 5-year-old Mail client your using was not designed to work seamlessly with Google's current back end, which has had 3 major changes in that time. Gmail was designed to work in a browser - most of us know that, and I tired of having to deal with Google's continual tweaking. And, with your older OS you have very few options - Thunderbird v. 38, a compliant web browser, and Apple Mail.

You wrote that you did some research and listed something like "disabling two-factor authentication" - SN's Mail wasn't set up to work with that newer feature as it's implemented in Gmail's back end. But, having "fixed" this "Mail doesn't work with Gmail" whine/rant - it's just a bit more complicated than that, and, having migrated my Google Apps account to an Exchange Server and an Office 365 account, I know that the Gmail account modifications work perfectly. The "Gmail Pro-Tip: Limit IMAP folder sizes" listed here - https://www.macstories.net/tutorials/how-to-configure-gmail-with-os-x-yosemite-mail/ - pretty much are necessary, and much of that and more are buried in Google's "instructions".

Keep in mind that your Mail app might be - and is likely - choking the connection(s) to your account. My Google Apps account permitted opening additional connections to my two Exchange accounts, and it still took hours - the free Gmail accounts have no such setting. And, whenever there's a major OS update, mail servers get hammered all over again. Also, change the polling period to 15 or more minutes - that's included with Google's instructions.

I had Snow Leopard, and used Mail for my Google Apps account. I had no problems with Mail or my account, but I took the time to read Google's instructions for connecting to their accounts. Good luck.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

I'm glad to hear you wouldn't bail over a thing like a lame bundled app. I had forgotten about Thunderbird when I did my earlier post. It is seldom (if ever) updated but still works better than Apple mail.app (which isn't a very high bar these days).

I don't know what makes you think Thunderbird is never updated. Thunderbird gets updated all the time here (I've been using it forever). In fact, I often think it gets updated TOO often.

Still, it's not as bad as Firefox, though which has utterly constant updates that often break theming on a regular basis to the point where there are hardly any themes left to pick from because the Mozilla team has ticked off all the theme developers who didn't think they would have to spend the rest of their lives providing updates because the Mozilla team constantly BREAKS things. No wonder so many have switched to Chrome (Firefox even makes itself look like Chrome without a lot of effort to switch back to the old look and behaviors and it is those differences that I chose Firefox in the first place over lame spyware Chrome and slow buggy boring looking Safari).

 

[kwren]

Ever since OS X Mavericks was released, some customers using the built-in Mail.app application have repeatedly had issues retrieving new mail messages, deleting or moving messages, and more. Some of the problems were fixed in an update released back in November, and then in OS X 10.9.1, but for some, the issues retrieving new messages persist.

Some users found that quitting and restarting Mail forced the application to download new messages, but Apple has now published an awkward workaround that allows the app to stay open while still forcing a download of new messages.
There is no indication of when the bugs with Mail.app will be fixed, though beta releases of OS X 10.9.2 ask developers to test Mail.app for issues.

Article Link: Apple Acknowledges Continuing Issues with OS X Mail, Offers Manual Workaround

Didn't work with OX 10.11.2. any other ideas?

 

[chrfr]

Didn't work with OX 10.11.2. any other ideas?

Update to 10.11.4 and see if the problems go away. Otherwise recheck your mail settings. Given that this thread originated back with 10.9, over 2 years ago, it's no surprise that the directions in this thread don't fix your problem.

 

[maxsix]

Once again Gmail prevails...