Gmail no longer pushes new messages to Apple Mail in Mavericks

[damian]

I Googled [gmail push Mavericks OR 10.9 "use idle command"], and restricted results to the last year; absolutely nothing came up, so I decided to post this:

Gmail seems to no longer push email to Apple Mail in Mavericks—at least for me.

In OS 10.8 and before, enabling "Use IDLE command if the server supports it" caused Gmail to instantly push new emails to Apple Mail. No longer.

With the new "Check for new messages Automatically" option, new messages aren't coming in at all, or with severe delays (I don't recall which). When I change it to "Check for new messages Every minute," it checks every minute, which is okay, but not what I had in previous OSs: instant pushing of new messages.

Has anyone managed to solve this problem?

Or does anyone at least know what's causing the problem, and whether it's potentially fixable?

 

[satcomer]

Yea Google made a change to their IMAP in the last week. Go back into you web GMail settings and make sure you have things setup. Plus read the blog article Mail in Mavericks Changes the Gmail Equation.

 

[damian]

Yea Google made a change to their IMAP in the last week. Go back into you web GMail settings and make sure you have things setup. Plus read the blog article Mail in Mavericks Changes the Gmail Equation.

Thanks, Satcomer, for your feedback.

Unfortunately, it leaves me with more questions than answers:

1. What leads you to believe that Google made a change to their IMAP in the last week? Could it be that the change is with Mavericks, not Google?

2. When you say, "Go back into you web GMail settings and make sure you have things setup," what do you mean?

3. I read the Tidbits blog article that you referenced before posting here. From what I can see, it says nothing about push, and has nothing to do with push. Am I missing something?

 

[satcomer]

Thanks, Satcomer, for your feedback.

Unfortunately, it leaves me with more questions than answers:

1. What leads you to believe that Google made a change to their IMAP in the last week? Could it be that the change is with Mavericks, not Google?

2. When you say, "Go back into you web GMail settings and make sure you have things setup," what do you mean?

3. I read the Tidbits blog article that you referenced before posting here. From what I can see, it says nothing about push, and has nothing to do with push. Am I missing something?

1. No. Google made a sight change.

2. Check out Gmail settings. In the Google Mail page click on the top right gear icon and select settings. In the Settings windows click on the forwarding and pop/imap tab and make sure you are using IMAP.

3. No. In going into it click on small 'Configuration instructions' to tweak your GMail setup.

 

[damian]

1. No. Google made a sight change.

2. Check out Gmail settings. In the Google Mail page click on the top right gear icon and select settings. In the Settings windows click on the forwarding and pop/imap tab and make sure you are using IMAP.

3. No. In going into it click on small 'Configuration instructions' to tweak your GMail setup.

Thanks for your reply.

What slight change did Google make? Can you provide a link to your source of this information?

As for Gmail settings, IMAP has been enabled on my account for years, so I'm not clear what else, if anything, there is to tweak.

 

[DaPhatty]

I, too, would like to know what changes Satcomer is referring to.

As for Push not working, have you considered deleting and re-creating your Gmail settings in your Mail app? After my Mavericks upgrade was complete, the Mail app simply stopped working with my Gmail account (message delivery stopped working, message labels were incorrectly displayed...) Deleting and recreating my account settings fixed the problem (although it took a while for the data to download).

 

[damian]

I, too, would like to know what changes Satcomer is referring to.

As for Push not working, have you considered deleting and re-creating your Gmail settings in your Mail app? After my Mavericks upgrade was complete, the Mail app simply stopped working with my Gmail account (message delivery stopped working, message labels were incorrectly displayed...) Deleting and recreating my account settings fixed the problem (although it took a while for the data to download).

DaPhatty, thanks for the tip. Is Gmail now pushing new messages to your mail.app instantly?

I'm hesitant to try what you suggest, because I imagine it could take days for mail.app to re-download all 11GB of emails I have archived in Gmail, but I'll do it if it seems to be the only way.

 

[satcomer]

Thanks for your reply.

What slight change did Google make? Can you provide a link to your source of this information?

As for Gmail settings, IMAP has been enabled on my account for years, so I'm not clear what else, if anything, there is to tweak.

What change? Take a look at all the changes Google made recently. They made these changes and it affected GMail IMAP server settings. Plus think of it this way, Google doesn't like the Mac or Mac Users at all. Mark my words when I say Google IMAP will become paid only in a few years.

 

[damian]

What change? Take a look at all the changes Google made recently. They made these changes and it affected GMail IMAP server settings. Plus think of it this way, Google doesn't like the Mac or Mac Users at all. Mark my words when I say Google IMAP will become paid only in a few years.

I'm confused. I searched the article to which you linked for "IMAP," and nothing came up. While I suppose it's conceivable that IMAP could become a paid service, I can't really imagine a connection between Google selling users' endorsements having anything to do with IMAP failing to push Gmail to mail.app in Mavericks.

Regardless, I'm not here to bash Google. I'm just looking to get my Gmail pushed to mail.app, like it did before I upgraded to Mavericks. Anyone have any suggestions or ideas?

 

[rochakagrawal]

Was it fixed?

@damian, did you manage to get it fixed? I still have the same problem

thx

 

[satcomer]

I'm confused. I searched the article to which you linked for "IMAP," and nothing came up. While I suppose it's conceivable that IMAP could become a paid service, I can't really imagine a connection between Google selling users' endorsements having anything to do with IMAP failing to push Gmail to mail.app in Mavericks.

Regardless, I'm not here to bash Google. I'm just looking to get my Gmail pushed to mail.app, like it did before I upgraded to Mavericks. Anyone have any suggestions or ideas?

No the article says Gmail will sell your Gmail's contents to advertisers! So Google is not just using your Gmail contents but now is selling the info to other advertisers.

 

[damian]

@damian, did you manage to get it fixed? I still have the same problem

thx

I clean-installed Mavericks on a new computer, then set up my Gmail IMAP account from scratch on said computer (i.e., no migration), and I still have the problem, to some extent. Sometimes, new messages/changes seem to be pushed instantly; sometimes, they take many minutes to arrive.

I've actually become so used to this problem, by now, that I've largely stopped thinking about it. Fortunately, new messages are pushed instantly to my iPhone, so I always know when I have a new message. Then, if I mess around enough with the inbox on my Mac—flagging and unflagging messages, synchronizing mailboxes, rebuilding, quitting and reopening Mail, etc.—eventually, the new messages come through. I've lost the patience to carefully experiment, to discover exactly what makes the account synchronize. At this point, I just randomly fiddle, until something works.

By the way, I updated with "Mail Update for Mavericks Version 1.0." That was supposed to solve the problem. For me, it did not :/

According to https://www.macrumors.com/2013/12/03/apple-seeds-os-x-10-9-1-build-13b40-to-developers/ , "Last week’s [10.9.1] build included several fixes for Gmail in OS X Mail..."

Fingers crossed that they release it soon, and that it solves our problems.

 

[saberahul]

On a completely different topic, I'm sick of Mac Mail and recently tried other programs and ran into AirMail. Seems to be working well… maybe give that or Outlook or anything like Thunderbird a shot. Mac Mail is useless now, IMO.

 

[kalex]

No the article says Gmail will sell your Gmail's contents to advertisers! So Goole is not just using your Gmail contents but now is selling the info to other advertisers.

What does this have to do with changes to IMAP? /facepalm

 

[damian]

No the article says Gmail will sell your Gmail's contents to advertisers! So Goole is not just using your Gmail contents but now is selling the info to other advertisers.

What does this have to do with changes to IMAP? /facepalm

This.

 

[damian]

Ok. The resurrection of this thread inspired me to do some troubleshooting today.

I read and archived a bunch of emails on my iPhone, then went back to my MacBook, and discovered that, hours later, the Gmail messages I had read and archived still appeared as unread in the Mail app on my MacBook. Strangely, though, I still received some new messages on my MacBook, even while the old messages remained unsynchronized.

So I tried a bunch of things, none of which worked:

• quit and re-opened Mail
• synchronize the account (by right-clicking, then choosing “synchronize…"
• rebuilt the inbox (by choosing the mailbox menu, then rebuild)
• flagged and unflagged a random message in the inbox
• archived a random message in the inbox
• sent a message to self
• waited
• received a new message from someone else
• took the account offline (by right-clicking on the inbox, then clicking "Take...offline"), then took the account online

Anyone discover a solution to this problem?

 

[cal6n]

I had a friend with what may be a similar issue.

Her 10.8.5 iMac was fine; her iOS 7 iPhone was fine; but her 10.9 13" MBP had simply stopped showing new emails from gmail and ntlworld, who incidentally use a gmail back end.

I checked all settings were identical between the two Macs and the Connection Doctor on the MBP was showing four greens. Really frustrating.

Then I noticed her Apple ID was linked to a yahoo.co.uk email address, although that email wasn't in use on her MBP. So, to aid diagnosis, I set her up with an iCloud email address, linking that to her Apple ID and enabling email.

As soon as the iCloud address began working on her MBP, the two gmail accounts started retrieving emails from their respective servers.

Problem solved, in her case, although I have no idea why the gmail accounts should effectively be disabled without an iCloud address present in the client.

 

[kalex]

Ok. The resurrection of this thread inspired me to do some troubleshooting today.

I read and archived a bunch of emails on my iPhone, then went back to my MacBook, and discovered that, hours later, the Gmail messages I had read and archived still appeared as unread in the Mail app on my MacBook. Strangely, though, I still received some new messages on my MacBook, even while the old messages remained unsynchronized.

So I tried a bunch of things. Here's what worked, followed by what didn't work:

WORKED (i.e., made the inbox synchronize):

• took the account offline (by right-clicking on the inbox, then clicking "Take...offline"), then took the account online

DIDN'T WORK

• quit and re-opened Mail
• synchronize the account (by right-clicking, then choosing “synchronize…"
• rebuilt the inbox (by choosing the mailbox menu, then rebuild)
• flagged and unflagged a random message in the inbox
• archived a random message in the inbox
• sent a message to self
• waited
• received a new message from someone else

Based on these results, the problem seems to be that Mail assumes that the inbox is already synchronized, even when it isn't, so doing things like quitting, synchronizing, and rebuilding the inbox doesn't make a difference.

Taking it offline and bringing it back online, however, seems to force Mail to recognize that the inbox (or whatever box) could have been changed while it was offline, so it therefore compares the current state of the inbox on Mail with the state of the inbox on Gmail's server, and updates the inbox on Mail accordingly.

Make sense? Match your experience? I was able to try this only once (because oftentimes, this problem doesn't occur in the first place), so I'll have to try it again (when the opportunity presents itself) to confirm my theory and solution.

mine seems to be syncing. But i have another annoyance. If i reply to any email from mail.app and then load gmail on my android phone, those emails that I replied to have a draft saved. I tried to disable saving draft on the server in mail preferences but it doesn't get saved for some reason. Waiting for 10.9.1 to be released as I saw that it suppose to fix gmail issues.

 

[damian]

mine seems to be syncing. But i have another annoyance. If i reply to any email from mail.app and then load gmail on my android phone, those emails that I replied to have a draft saved. I tried to disable saving draft on the server in mail preferences but it doesn't get saved for some reason. Waiting for 10.9.1 to be released as I saw that it suppose to fix gmail issues.

I'm not sure if I'm suffering from this problem currently (perhaps it's intermittent—not sure), but I've certainly suffered it from it in the past.

It would have been nice if Apple had done a bit more testing before releasing such a buggy app for what I'm guessing is the most popular email provider in the US.

I've seen a number of people blame Google for their non-standard implementation of IMAP, but that doesn't excuse Apple from releasing such buggy software, IMHO.

Perhaps the problems didn't occur until mail.app for Mavericks was released—assuming the problems are triggered by a large volume of Gmail users using 10.9 mail.app—but I doubt it.

 

[olegunnar]

I have the same problem that most of you experience, however not just with a gmail account.

I have two mail accounts, one gmail and one not, both re-set up after 10.9 installation (i.e. not migrated). I thought it had to do with mail.app napping, as I can usually (but not always) get mail updates a few minutes after I've messed around with the application.

Perhaps 10.9.1 fixes it.

 

[DisplacedMic]

No the article says Gmail will sell your Gmail's contents to advertisers! So Google is not just using your Gmail contents but now is selling the info to other advertisers.

what is the matter with you?

 

[satcomer]

what is the matter with you?

Nothing is wrong with me. I have a problem with people just giving up their own privacy just to use cool things (like everyone else) and trying to convince me that it all good.

People get on Apple because of iCloud but at least Apple doesn't sell your iCloud info to advertisers like Goole does. People seem to forget Google gets it money from selling the info of it's users to advertisers because it is an advertiser's company.

 

[DisplacedMic]

Nothing is wrong with me. I have a problem with people just giving up their own privacy just to use cool things (like everyone else) and trying to convince me that it all good.

People get on Apple because of iCloud but at least Apple doesn't sell your iCloud info to advertisers like Goole does. People seem to forget Google gets it money from selling the info of it's users to advertisers because it is an advertiser's company.

i am fundamentally against dog-fighting but i'm not posting articles about it in unrelated stories.

 

[satcomer]

i am fundamentally against dog-fighting but i'm not posting articles about it in unrelated stories.

What are you speaking about? I replied to damian that Google did make a change and pointed to article speaking of the change. This was not "dogfighting" and was replying to his question and my first link pointed to a possible fix for Gmail.

 

[damian]

Update: After archiving some messages on my phone today, I once again found my inbox out of sync on my MacBook. I tried the solution that worked before—taking the account offline, then bringing it back online—but this time, it didn't work. I updated my earlier post about troubleshooting according. Anyone find a solution to this vexing problem?