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Mavericks Mail.app + Gmail changes

Can't change mailbox behavior

In my case everything is syncing well and the buttons are working. My problem is that I can't change the mailbox behaviors. Every time I change a setting, it goes back to it's previous value after saving.

Does anybody have the same problem?

I don't want my drafts to be stored on the server, since I don't want my messages to be synced with Google and their NSA friends even before I finish writing the message. If they're going to have them, at least they can have only the final version.
 
This is going to be a huge problem for me if a solution isn't found or implemented. Apple Mail had enough problems before this, but this is ridiculous.
 
Mail is behaving properly overall, but after a day of having all of my mail properly identified as belonging to the "Inbox" of my Gmail accounts, now I'm having messages showing up in the "Archive (All Mail)" again. Unlike before, it's working properly with my "smart mailbox" settings and still shows up in the Inbox of the corresponding account.

I don't understand why it's happening, though. Worse, it seems to be totally random. I received three emails this morning that are tagged as being in the Archive (All Mail), and about an hour later I received an email to the same account that is identified as being in the Inbox. Restarting Mail without reading any of the messages resulted in that last message being identified as being in the Archive (All Mail). I logged into my Gmail account through the web browser to see what it looks like from Google's end and all of the messages appear in the Inbox of the web applet; I don't have to go to the All Mail folder to see them.

The earlier behavior of Archive (All Mail) messages not showing up in my "smart mailbox" may be due to Mail being bogged down with initial synchronization, as Weaselboy suggested. What isn't clear to me is why Mail is identifying messages as belonging to the Archive (All Mail) folder when Gmail itself seems to be sorting them to the Inbox. It's probably something on the back end... I don't see how this behavior is more beneficial to users than how it was in OS X 10.8 and earlier.

Edit: Immediately after posting this I received OS X notifications for new mail for the messages that I had received earlier this morning (which are still unread); Mail is now identifying all of them as belonging to the Inbox (and not Archive (All Mail)). Either Mail is doing some very bizarre things or Google is tinkering on their end and Mail is just receiving the downstream results.
 
I'm having trouble with Mail checking for new messages - I have Outlook running on a PC and this updates almost real-time, and my phone alerts me pretty quickly as well, but Mail doesn't even check when I hit the Get New Messages icon, and when it does pull new messages down, it is long after the messages were sent and hit the Gmail Inbox.

Hating this! :mad:
 
Change mail service??

I have always used the stock mail app, but have been thinking to get away from Gmail for some time now due to many reasons. (push, privacy, on & on)

This may be the final straw for me. Yes I know that some blame Apple, but it is also well documented that Google does not follow typical imap protocols... Not going to get in to that argument.

Any recommendations for a good email provider with good spam filtering? I already have Outlook.com, and of course my me.com address though I'm not so sure that iCloud filters spam as well as others. Just looking for other members input on what works well.

Thanks...
 
I'm not sure why people are still putting up with Gmail and their proprietary, unorthodox implementation of IMAP. All of your problems are due to using Gmail. I was an early adopter of Gmail with my main account having been started back in 2004 when it first was available only through invitational Beta. But the IMAP implementation along with the increasing interface bloat and poor design made me cut the cord recently. And once I finally broke away from Google's walled garden, I was in tech heaven using my Macs and iPhones. iCloud works great for calendars and contacts and email.

The only downside with iCloud email was that you couldn't use your own personal domain. For a long time, that was the only reason we stuck with Gmail through Google Apps. But then they dropped Exchange and dropped the free Apps accounts.

The solution? Outlook.com

Outlook.com recently added IMAP and with that simple addition, you can now have your own personal domain and use it with IMAP on your Mac and all for free. And instead of the weird IMAP implementation and lack of real folders causing headaches when using Mail, Outlook.com actually works perfect with Mail.app with virtually no hassle or setup required and it has both real folders and categories (like Gmail labels) if you really need to use them. Plus on your iDevices it support Exchange ActiveSync for free push email.

There really is no point in using Gmail on a Mac anymore unless you just want to deal with all of its idiosyncricies and syncing issues in Mail because of its non-standard approach. I absolutely love the Mail.app. It works great with my iCloud, Outlook.com email, 2 more IMAP email accounts, and 1 Exchange account I use. Gmail is just a massive headache and is the only oddball.

Trust me on this. Cut the Gmail umbilical cord.

Just. Let. It. Go.
 
newagemac said:
The solution? Outlook.com

Outlook.com recently added IMAP and with that simple addition, you can now have your own personal domain and use it with IMAP on your Mac and all for free. And instead of the weird IMAP implementation and lack of real folders causing headaches when using Mail, Outlook.com actually works perfect with Mail.app with virtually no hassle or setup required and it has both real folders and categories (like Gmail labels) if you really need to use them. Plus on your iDevices it support Exchange ActiveSync for free push email.]
Click to expand...

This is really helpful. Outlook.com was lacking IMAP until recently, and I wasn't sure that one could use your own domain (lebigmac.com). Those are two key features that have me using gmail instead of icloud or other services (aol, yahoo, etc.).

2 questions:
1) How does outlook calendars integrate with google calendars?
2) Does it integrate well with Outlook for Mac? (I actually preferred entourage except that it doesn't play well with iPhones)
 
Also might add that if you want full Exchange email instead of IMAP for your personal domain, you can also get the Exchange Online service they offer. It's $4 a month by itself or you can get it included with Office 365.

We trialled Office365 for a bit but ultimately decided not to go with it for now. But in the meantime, Exchange Online for our main domain and the free Outlook.com for our other domains has been working out great. That plus the new iWork apps with full feature parity between native Mac, native iOS, and web versions was all we needed to finally drop all of Google's services. We're basically all Apple now and everything finally just works.
 
I tried outlook.com IMAP with apple mail recently, and I must say my experience was not as good as newegemac's. It worked horribly for me. Very basic things did not work reliably, such as moving mail between folders. It would occasionally actually move it, other times it would spit out some random error about something not able to be read from [insert microsoft server here], other times it would just appear to do nothing at all. It seems like their IMAP support is still very much in its infancy, at least that was my experience. I also had a problem where new messages wouldn't appear in my inbox until I switched to another folder and then back to inbox. I had similar issues with all folders, if I moved something to another folder and then switched to that folder, it wouldn't appear until I fully synchronized the account and then switched back to the folder and other such gymnastics (if it even decided to move the message at all, as I mentioned above a lot of times it just wouldn't work). Downloading mail to my inbox and deleting mail to trash were the only things that worked, folders were giving me nothing but trouble for some reason. I don't know why I had so many issues with it when everyone else reports it works fine :( I guess it just hates me lol.


I recently started trying out fastmail's 2 month trial, and its IMAP support is flawless and totally standard/vanilla. Everything works perfectly with apple mail for me with this service with absolutely no tweaking or workarounds required, even the archive button. I'm really happy with it so far, I've set it up in mail.app on my macbook, on my android phone's mail app and in em client on my windows machine, works great on all of them. It actually has a pretty nice, clean web interface too. downside is they don't offer any calendar service, and only has contacts sync via LDAP (which is read only).

edit: but apparently they are working on Carddav contacts support and Caldav calendar, so this could be an excellent all-around solution once they implement that!: https://twitter.com/FastMailFM/status/393138107505070080

Anyway, I definitely agree with newagemac about cutting gmail either way. If you use 100% webmail gmail is excellent, but for anything else its disappointing and a PIA. I recommend anyone try outlook.com themselves first, since I seem to be the only one that had a lot of issues with it, but fastmail is another excellent alternative if you want quality IMAP access that works reliably with any standards compliant IMAP client (although it is a paid service, but 39 dollars a year for the enhanced plan isn't that bad and there's a free trial).
 
Last edited:
newagemac said:
There really is no point in using Gmail on a Mac anymore unless you just want to deal with all of its idiosyncricies and syncing issues in Mail because of its non-standard approach. I absolutely love the Mail.app. It works great with my iCloud, Outlook.com email, 2 more IMAP email accounts, and 1 Exchange account I use. Gmail is just a massive headache and is the only oddball.

Trust me on this. Cut the Gmail umbilical cord.

Just. Let. It. Go.
Click to expand...

I absolutely agree with this. Yes, I have used Gmail for many years, but it is time to quit using work arounds and blindly being a sheep to Google.

I now use Outlook for mail, and my iCloud for notes, calendars, contacts and such.

EDIT: It appears now that Outlook doesn't delete a message from the server if you delete it from the OSX Mail app. This means it doesn't delete it from my i devices... Not happy.

Still looking for a good alternative or solution...
 
Last edited:
Le Big Mac said:
This is really helpful. Outlook.com was lacking IMAP until recently, and I wasn't sure that one could use your own domain (lebigmac.com). Those are two key features that have me using gmail instead of icloud or other services (aol, yahoo, etc.).

2 questions:
1) How does outlook calendars integrate with google calendars?
2) Does it integrate well with Outlook for Mac? (I actually preferred entourage except that it doesn't play well with iPhones)
Click to expand...

We only use Outlook for the email. We use iCloud for contacts and calendars. You don't really get the full benefits until you do the full iCloud integration.

I haven't tried it with Outlook for Mac. We got fed up with trying to integrate these other services to work well with Macs and Microsoft's lackluster efforts on native Mac applications got the chopping block. Apple has moved to yearly upgrades and there are some really beneficial things happening under the hood that requires developers to be in tune with Mac specific coding and the directions Apple is heading.

So nowadays, if you aren't specifically a Mac developer and/or at least put your stuff on the Mac App Store you are in danger of being removed from my Mac and replaced with someone who does pass those tests. Google's insistence on using web apps for everything (and all the performance/productivity hits that come with that) is why we dropped them completely.
 
newagemac said:
I'm not sure why people are still putting up with Gmail and their proprietary, unorthodox implementation of IMAP. All of your problems are due to using Gmail. I was an early adopter of Gmail with my main account having been started back in 2004 when it first was available only through invitational Beta. But the IMAP implementation along with the increasing interface bloat and poor design made me cut the cord recently. And once I finally broke away from Google's walled garden, I was in tech heaven using my Macs and iPhones. iCloud works great for calendars and contacts and email.

The only downside with iCloud email was that you couldn't use your own personal domain. For a long time, that was the only reason we stuck with Gmail through Google Apps. But then they dropped Exchange and dropped the free Apps accounts.

The solution? Outlook.com

Outlook.com recently added IMAP and with that simple addition, you can now have your own personal domain and use it with IMAP on your Mac and all for free. And instead of the weird IMAP implementation and lack of real folders causing headaches when using Mail, Outlook.com actually works perfect with Mail.app with virtually no hassle or setup required and it has both real folders and categories (like Gmail labels) if you really need to use them. Plus on your iDevices it support Exchange ActiveSync for free push email.

There really is no point in using Gmail on a Mac anymore unless you just want to deal with all of its idiosyncricies and syncing issues in Mail because of its non-standard approach. I absolutely love the Mail.app. It works great with my iCloud, Outlook.com email, 2 more IMAP email accounts, and 1 Exchange account I use. Gmail is just a massive headache and is the only oddball.

Trust me on this. Cut the Gmail umbilical cord.

Just. Let. It. Go.
Click to expand...

I must say, I am definitely considering this now. I've been using GMail since it was in beta but my opinion of Google was not quite so negative in those days. I'm not thrilled about using a Microsoft product either, but I did register my preferred email address with Outlook.com the day it launched, just to keep my options open. However the sticking point with other email services has always been that I use my own domain for 99% of email. I didn't realise you could do that with Outlook.com now, which is really interesting.

So how smooth is the transition? You can import all your email from GMail, right? Does it maintain the same folder structure? And how's the web interface, as I use the GMail one a lot at work, and would need to do the same with outlook.
 
I accidentally messed with these settings and I'm trying to see if I set everything back to normal.

Does this look right? Especially the first unchecked box under Responding.
 

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picciano said:
I'm using the Mavericks GM and have found a workaround to get the desired behavior with Gmail.

Right-click the toolbar in Apple Mail and select "Customize Toolbar...". Then drag the "Archive" button to your toolbar. If you want, you can then remove the "Delete" button from the toolbar, but I left mine because I use other accounts beside Gmail.
Click to expand...

Thanks for this tip!

Does anyone have any idea if we can map the Delete Key to archive instead of delete? Clicking the archive button is going to get really annoying.
 
I have not experienced the known issues reported between Gmail and Apple Mail.

Mail deletes and doesn't reappear. I also haven't experienced the mapping issues. I do not have all mail enabled.
 
newagemac said:
I don't think getting an "Archive" button is the problem. You could do that in Mail with Mountain Lion. The question is after you click the Archive button, does the Gmail message go to the "All Mail" label PLUS get removed from the Inbox? Because that is the way gmail is supposed to work.

And gmail will always be a little awkward to use in Mail.app until this is fixed. It's not really Apple's fault though. Gmail is using a proprietary, nonstandard implementation of IMAP which is causing all the problems and the reason I switched away from it.

So have you tried Mavericks and does it now work the way it is supposed to as I outlined above?
Click to expand...

Yes. Exactly like that.
 
jeitires said:
In my case everything is syncing well and the buttons are working. My problem is that I can't change the mailbox behaviors. Every time I change a setting, it goes back to it's previous value after saving.

Does anybody have the same problem?
Click to expand...

Yes, huge problem for me - my android phone now has 20-30 drafts in each conversation every time I write a reply on Mail.app - nightmare to try and remove these have finished emails from my phone (have to edit, remove, confirm each one).
 
newagemac said:
Correct what?
Click to expand...
Sorry, I wasn't particularly clear.

Has anyone found a way to rectify some of the issues with Apple Mail and Gmail? I understand that enabling "All Mail" visibility within Gmail's IMAP settings helps, but the issue I have now is that e-mail messages are either being copied when moved to different folders or are moving back to the "All Mail" folder within movements of originally moving them.

Also, the "All Mail" folder within Apple Mail shows the notification 'bubble' for new messages, but the "Inbox" folder does not.
 
I enjoyed Gmail and Apple Mail early on. Then when the IMAP issues arose where EVERYTHING within the Gmail browser version (All the folders, tags..etc) replicated themselves and constantly duplicated within Mail.app....I was able to use an old Time Machine backup from 10.5 that kept Mail.app the old way. When I upgraded to 10.9 I said "Hey. Why not. I'll try it their way. Maybe it's fixed."

It's fixed. At least for me. I have two Gmail inboxes. I get mail. I can send mail. The mail I send and receive is stored within the Gmail browser version in "All Mail."

Works for me.
 
It seems that Apple Mail has two issues with my system.

Firstly, now that the "All Mail" folder appears in the navigation panel, it shows the notification 'bubble' with the total number of new/unread e-mail messages, while the "Inbox" folder does not.

Secondly, when I receive and move to another folder an e-mail message I receive on my Apple iPad or Apple iPhone, the change is not updated with Apple Mail, which leaves the e-mail message in the "Inbox" folder.

Does anyone know how I can fix these issues?
 
Like some other gmail users, when I move an email with the mail app from the inbox to another folder (label), the moved email reappears in the inbox. I spent an hour or more searching for and testing various solutions and settings but nothing helped. There is a workaround, which is to move the email from the inbox to the trash and then from the trash to the destination folder, but that gets pretty annoying. I also purchased airmail which does not have this problem, but I didn't care for the app (too complicated for my needs). I suspect we just wait for a fix from google or apple.
 
Since the update release for Apple Mail does anyone know whether the 'Show in IMAP' option needs to be selected for Gmail's 'All Mail' system label?
 
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