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How Mavericks ruined Apple Mail for Gmail users

33 points by rosser 13y ago

ratsbane 13y ago
Has something changed with gmail imap recently? I use Apple Mail every few days mostly just to keep a backup of my several gmail accounts. After reading this I remembered I hadn't done this in a few days so I opened Apple Mail on my Macbook (not upgraded to Mavericks yet) and got password prompts for each account. None of the passwords I entered was accepted. I can log in through the web just fine.
w4 13y ago
This is really problematic, since I been using Gmail + Apple Mail for basically...ever. I guess it's time to stop putting off moving to a more full featured client. Speaking of which, any recommendations for clients that feature a Mailbox-esque "remind" or "save for later" option? It looks like, of those linked in the story, only Mail Pilot offers one. However, their desktop client isn't yet available. Stock web-based Gmail is no good, since I have a ton of different addresses I use on the regular (no, they can't be unified, they're for different organizations), and the logging in/out is a huge pain. Plus I desperately need notifications, or I'll be even less organized with email than I already am.
- jinushaun 13y ago
  The most full featured Gmail client is the website.
  - w4 13y ago
    Right -- but, like I said, I use multiple accounts that can't be unified into one account, and the logging in/out to access them is a mess.
    - lotyrin 13y ago
      Why log out? Since 2010 or so you've been able to be logged in as multiple accounts and switch via drop down.
    - elithrar 13y ago
      http://mailplaneapp.com/index.html http://mailplaneapp.com/index.html - multiple accounts are a breeze.
dgulino 13y ago
Reduce high cpu utilization from Mail: Spotlight -> Disable Mail & Messages http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/290194-apple-mail-high-cpu-usage/ http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/290194-apple-mail-hig...
- jlarocco 13y ago
  Not having email indexed for searching isn't a good solution, IMO.
Shivetya 13y ago
I am not experiencing this issue. However I did get whacked when upgrading my iPhone which then decided to use GMails unread count to determine what I had not read. That was very frustrating, I went from a dozen or so unread on my phone to thousands. The easy solution was to flag it all read at Gmail and my phone calmed down. I am going to assume that is why I am not being hit with this issue he mentions. Both my mail accounts on my iMac are just fine. Still never understood Apple's fascination with requiring three keys just to mark a message as read.
hnriot 13y ago
What a non-issue. If "you're a huge Gmail user on the Mac" then just use the web interface. The only place where the web interface isn't the prime way to interact with gmail is on the phone and google have an app for that. If you really must use a thick client to use gmail, Thunderbird installs and runs just fine on the mac.
- bigdubs 13y ago
  Or Postbox, which also still works just fine under Mavericks.
- 3JPLW 13y ago
  Replace "huge Gmail user" with "huge email user that happens to use Gmail servers as the host" and you can begin to see the trouble. It shouldn't matter which IMAP client you use. If there's trouble in communication between Mail.app and Gmail's IMAP servers, then one of the two parties messed up. If there's a regression in Apple's Mail.app, it is a big deal if you have an established workflow with any piece of software. Likewise if Google is making it harder to use your IMAP client of choice, it's a big deal. Users have established patterns and they're hard to break. Hell, just re-syncing my whole email archive into another client would take days (Google throttles batch downloads aggressively, and I don't always have internet connectivity when I need access to my email archive). Nevermind learning a new user interface. When software regresses, users will complain.
  - hnriot 13y ago
    I still don't see the trouble. I use imap for work email, because our corporate web mail looks like yahoo circa 2004, but gmail I use chrome, a far better user experience.
    - rosser 13y ago
      At $work, we use Google Apps. What happens to people in my situation, who were using Mail.app instead of the web interface?
philwelch 13y ago
There's always the option of switching to Fastmail. If you're using Apple Mail instead of Gmail's web client, as I was, it was because Apple Mail caught up by growing an "archive" button and Gmail regressed. This made Gmail the more replaceable part, to me.
cmiller1 13y ago
I'm having no problems with Gmail on Apple's Mail on Mavericks... perhaps I'm just not a big enough e-mail user? I only have about 10000 messages on that account.
shocks 13y ago
Apart from Thunderbird and mutt - what good email clients are around for OSX that support PGP?
- chipotle_coyote 13y ago
  Postbox lists a plugin for "Enigmail," described as "Send and receive signed and encrypted messages using OpenPGP provided by GnuPG." I (obviously!) don't use Enigmail, but I've been a happy Postbox user for years. It also works fairly easily with S/MIME, which is what I've used for signing and encryption in the past.
3JPLW 13y ago
The only problematic part for me has been that the setting "Store draft messages on the server" reverted back to being on. When enabled, it ends up generating hundreds of autosave messages and repeatedly trashing them. But Mail.app seems to be working exactly as it used to otherwise. I use an IMAP connection to Gmail, with a full local archive and over 54k messages. Maybe I just haven't run into the problems yet? I don't use smart mailboxes; perhaps that's where all the trouble is.
- itafroma 13y ago
  I've been using Mail.app with Gmail since DP1 with four separate accounts and your experiences are exactly the same as mine: business as usual except for the hundreds of draft messages being generated due to "Store draft messages on the server" being re-checked. I do, however, use smart mailboxes: they have no effect on the functioning of Gmail. They shouldn't, either: they're not much more than local saved searches. I suspect this might be a case of correlation rather than causation.
aroman 13y ago
I highly, HIGHLY recommend Airmail[0] as basically the best gmail, perhaps general email client for Mavericks. It is incredibly actively developed (betas are free, stable on MAS), immensely feature rich, has out of the box excellent gmail-specific integration, and even great Mavericks support including in-line notification bubble replying as of today. I have no affiliation with the app at all, but I too was incredibly dismayed by how awful Gmail + Mail.app works these days. [0]: http://airmailapp.com http://airmailapp.com
- cheshire137 13y ago
  Just bought this for $2 and am trying it out. Thanks for the recommendation!
- Lazare 13y ago
  I've been using Airmail for a while, and it's very functional; sort of a spiritual successor to Sparrow. The other Gmail-on-OSX clients I've tried don't feel ready for prime time in comparison. (Again, no affiliation; just like the product.)
- techscruggs 13y ago
  Agreed. Airmail is my favorite email client too. Just to set expectations, it does crash daily on me. That being said, it is still the best option out there.
  - MartinCron 13y ago
    It's a sad state of affairs when the best option is one that crashes daily.
    - Lazare 13y ago
      I've been using it for many months, heavily, and I think it's crashed once...and that was while using one of the beta builds. Experiences clearly vary. :)
- jdhendrickson 13y ago
derefr 13y ago
Here's an interesting question to me: has anyone, instead of switching away from Mail.app to use Gmail, tried switching to purely using an Apple (iCloud) mail account to get Apple's "intended" Mail.app experience? How is it, relative to, say, the Gmail-launched-from-the-Chrome-app-launcher experience?
- YooLi 13y ago
  You don't need to use iCloud mail to get Apple's "intended" experience. You can use any email that follows the IMAP standard. Fastmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. Gmail has a custom, non-standard IMAP implementation.
ROFISH 13y ago
Actually, I had an issue with Mail when I first started. In years past, after an OS X upgrade, Mail.app would show a "Upgrade Mail" prompt before using. Now it appears that instead, it's happily showing a blank set of emails while it slowly (5 minutes-ish for me) converts to the new version. This is, of course, confusing to the user because it doesn't show ANY indication that it's converting to a new version. So likely, it's still converting the emails. That's why CPU spikes when you first load too; it's not Spotlight but the conversion process (and Spotlight is reading them while converting).
- X-Istence 13y ago
  Actually the new Mail upon first startup did say it was upgrading the mail database and everything else associated with it ...
pbreit 13y ago
Do any of the mail clients implement Gmail's new Promos/Updates tabs? I'm looking for a happier medium between hiding those messages yet them still being quite accessible.
northernmonkey 13y ago
Works well with Gmail for me. I suspect there is more to the problem than a simple broad incompatibility.
egypturnash 13y ago
I've been using GMail with Mail for a while. Works fine for me. Upgrading to Mavericks changed absolutely nothing.
matthewmacleod 13y ago
I don't get it - what's the actual complaint? In my experience, Mail works fine with Gmail - multiple accounts and quite a bit of volume. The web interface seriously pisses me off.
- dmlorenzetti 13y ago
  This article talks about the problem(s) in greater detail: http://tidbits.com/article/14219 http://tidbits.com/article/14219
stock_toaster 13y ago
I was having this exact issue. While fiddling with something else, I happened to have mail.app open on one of those empty smart folders in the background, and did this from the terminal: sudo mdutil -i on / Now mind you, it was _already_ enabled. I had previously tried forcing reindex (-E) but that did nothing. No clue why setting 'enable' _again_ made any kind of difference, but suddenly my smart folders sprang to life. I will keep an eye on it, and see if it keeps working properly.

33 points by rosser 13y ago

Has something changed with gmail imap recently? I use Apple Mail every few days mostly just to keep a backup of my several gmail accounts. After reading this I remembered I hadn't done this in a few days so I opened Apple Mail on my Macbook (not upgraded to Mavericks yet) and got password prompts for each account. None of the passwords I entered was accepted. I can log in through the web just fine.

w4 13y ago

This is really problematic, since I been using Gmail + Apple Mail for basically...ever. I guess it's time to stop putting off moving to a more full featured client. Speaking of which, any recommendations for clients that feature a Mailbox-esque "remind" or "save for later" option? It looks like, of those linked in the story, only Mail Pilot offers one. However, their desktop client isn't yet available. Stock web-based Gmail is no good, since I have a ton of different addresses I use on the regular (no, they can't be unified, they're for different organizations), and the logging in/out is a huge pain. Plus I desperately need notifications, or I'll be even less organized with email than I already am.

jinushaun 13y ago
The most full featured Gmail client is the website.
- w4 13y ago
  Right -- but, like I said, I use multiple accounts that can't be unified into one account, and the logging in/out to access them is a mess.
  - lotyrin 13y ago
    Why log out? Since 2010 or so you've been able to be logged in as multiple accounts and switch via drop down.
  - elithrar 13y ago
    http://mailplaneapp.com/index.html http://mailplaneapp.com/index.html - multiple accounts are a breeze.

dgulino 13y ago

Reduce high cpu utilization from Mail: Spotlight -> Disable Mail & Messages http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/290194-apple-mail-high-cpu-usage/ http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/290194-apple-mail-hig...

jlarocco 13y ago
Not having email indexed for searching isn't a good solution, IMO.

Shivetya 13y ago

I am not experiencing this issue. However I did get whacked when upgrading my iPhone which then decided to use GMails unread count to determine what I had not read. That was very frustrating, I went from a dozen or so unread on my phone to thousands. The easy solution was to flag it all read at Gmail and my phone calmed down. I am going to assume that is why I am not being hit with this issue he mentions. Both my mail accounts on my iMac are just fine. Still never understood Apple's fascination with requiring three keys just to mark a message as read.

hnriot 13y ago

What a non-issue. If "you're a huge Gmail user on the Mac" then just use the web interface. The only place where the web interface isn't the prime way to interact with gmail is on the phone and google have an app for that. If you really must use a thick client to use gmail, Thunderbird installs and runs just fine on the mac.

bigdubs 13y ago
Or Postbox, which also still works just fine under Mavericks.
3JPLW 13y ago
Replace "huge Gmail user" with "huge email user that happens to use Gmail servers as the host" and you can begin to see the trouble. It shouldn't matter which IMAP client you use. If there's trouble in communication between Mail.app and Gmail's IMAP servers, then one of the two parties messed up. If there's a regression in Apple's Mail.app, it is a big deal if you have an established workflow with any piece of software. Likewise if Google is making it harder to use your IMAP client of choice, it's a big deal. Users have established patterns and they're hard to break. Hell, just re-syncing my whole email archive into another client would take days (Google throttles batch downloads aggressively, and I don't always have internet connectivity when I need access to my email archive). Nevermind learning a new user interface. When software regresses, users will complain.
- hnriot 13y ago
  I still don't see the trouble. I use imap for work email, because our corporate web mail looks like yahoo circa 2004, but gmail I use chrome, a far better user experience.
  - rosser 13y ago
    At $work, we use Google Apps. What happens to people in my situation, who were using Mail.app instead of the web interface?

philwelch 13y ago

There's always the option of switching to Fastmail. If you're using Apple Mail instead of Gmail's web client, as I was, it was because Apple Mail caught up by growing an "archive" button and Gmail regressed. This made Gmail the more replaceable part, to me.

cmiller1 13y ago

I'm having no problems with Gmail on Apple's Mail on Mavericks... perhaps I'm just not a big enough e-mail user? I only have about 10000 messages on that account.

shocks 13y ago

Apart from Thunderbird and mutt - what good email clients are around for OSX that support PGP?

chipotle_coyote 13y ago
Postbox lists a plugin for "Enigmail," described as "Send and receive signed and encrypted messages using OpenPGP provided by GnuPG." I (obviously!) don't use Enigmail, but I've been a happy Postbox user for years. It also works fairly easily with S/MIME, which is what I've used for signing and encryption in the past.

3JPLW 13y ago

The only problematic part for me has been that the setting "Store draft messages on the server" reverted back to being on. When enabled, it ends up generating hundreds of autosave messages and repeatedly trashing them. But Mail.app seems to be working exactly as it used to otherwise. I use an IMAP connection to Gmail, with a full local archive and over 54k messages. Maybe I just haven't run into the problems yet? I don't use smart mailboxes; perhaps that's where all the trouble is.

itafroma 13y ago
I've been using Mail.app with Gmail since DP1 with four separate accounts and your experiences are exactly the same as mine: business as usual except for the hundreds of draft messages being generated due to "Store draft messages on the server" being re-checked. I do, however, use smart mailboxes: they have no effect on the functioning of Gmail. They shouldn't, either: they're not much more than local saved searches. I suspect this might be a case of correlation rather than causation.

aroman 13y ago

I highly, HIGHLY recommend Airmail[0] as basically the best gmail, perhaps general email client for Mavericks. It is incredibly actively developed (betas are free, stable on MAS), immensely feature rich, has out of the box excellent gmail-specific integration, and even great Mavericks support including in-line notification bubble replying as of today. I have no affiliation with the app at all, but I too was incredibly dismayed by how awful Gmail + Mail.app works these days. [0]: http://airmailapp.com http://airmailapp.com

cheshire137 13y ago
Just bought this for $2 and am trying it out. Thanks for the recommendation!
Lazare 13y ago
I've been using Airmail for a while, and it's very functional; sort of a spiritual successor to Sparrow. The other Gmail-on-OSX clients I've tried don't feel ready for prime time in comparison. (Again, no affiliation; just like the product.)
techscruggs 13y ago
Agreed. Airmail is my favorite email client too. Just to set expectations, it does crash daily on me. That being said, it is still the best option out there.
- MartinCron 13y ago
  It's a sad state of affairs when the best option is one that crashes daily.
  - Lazare 13y ago
    I've been using it for many months, heavily, and I think it's crashed once...and that was while using one of the beta builds. Experiences clearly vary. :)
jdhendrickson 13y ago

derefr 13y ago

Here's an interesting question to me: has anyone, instead of switching away from Mail.app to use Gmail, tried switching to purely using an Apple (iCloud) mail account to get Apple's "intended" Mail.app experience? How is it, relative to, say, the Gmail-launched-from-the-Chrome-app-launcher experience?

YooLi 13y ago
You don't need to use iCloud mail to get Apple's "intended" experience. You can use any email that follows the IMAP standard. Fastmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. Gmail has a custom, non-standard IMAP implementation.

ROFISH 13y ago

Actually, I had an issue with Mail when I first started. In years past, after an OS X upgrade, Mail.app would show a "Upgrade Mail" prompt before using. Now it appears that instead, it's happily showing a blank set of emails while it slowly (5 minutes-ish for me) converts to the new version. This is, of course, confusing to the user because it doesn't show ANY indication that it's converting to a new version. So likely, it's still converting the emails. That's why CPU spikes when you first load too; it's not Spotlight but the conversion process (and Spotlight is reading them while converting).

X-Istence 13y ago
Actually the new Mail upon first startup did say it was upgrading the mail database and everything else associated with it ...

pbreit 13y ago

Do any of the mail clients implement Gmail's new Promos/Updates tabs? I'm looking for a happier medium between hiding those messages yet them still being quite accessible.

northernmonkey 13y ago

Works well with Gmail for me. I suspect there is more to the problem than a simple broad incompatibility.

egypturnash 13y ago

I've been using GMail with Mail for a while. Works fine for me. Upgrading to Mavericks changed absolutely nothing.

matthewmacleod 13y ago

I don't get it - what's the actual complaint? In my experience, Mail works fine with Gmail - multiple accounts and quite a bit of volume. The web interface seriously pisses me off.

dmlorenzetti 13y ago
This article talks about the problem(s) in greater detail: http://tidbits.com/article/14219 http://tidbits.com/article/14219

stock_toaster 13y ago

I was having this exact issue. While fiddling with something else, I happened to have mail.app open on one of those empty smart folders in the background, and did this from the terminal: sudo mdutil -i on / Now mind you, it was _already_ enabled. I had previously tried forcing reindex (-E) but that did nothing. No clue why setting 'enable' _again_ made any kind of difference, but suddenly my smart folders sprang to life. I will keep an eye on it, and see if it keeps working properly.