Gmail no longer pushes new messages to Apple Mail in Mavericks

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?

 

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?

 

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, 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.

 

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?

 

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 http://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.

 

This.

 

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?

 

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.

 

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?