Connection failures with GMail in Mail 6.0

After upgrading to Mountain Lion, Mail transferred my accounts to the new format and since then I have been having connection issues with my GMail accounts. The strange thing is that they connect fine as soon as I open / restart Mail, but fail to connect after some time, with no apparrent solution. I've triple checked all settings, which worked fine under Lion and still work fine initially. I've never seen a problem like this where the accounts stop working after a certain time, so I'm stumped. Any help would be appreciated!

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion

Posted on Jul 28, 2012 10:37 PM

Sep 20, 2014 12:13 PM in response to b_77

Building on what Bravedawg said:

The "Internet Accounts" and "Mail>Preferences>Accounts" offer two separate access points for the same accounts, but the problem that is occurring is not a result of these not syncing with each other. In fact it is a result of your account having separate storage for IMAP and SMTP passwords.

When you create an app-specific password for Mail on google, it tells you to go to accounts and enter the password in the IMAP section. It does not mention, however, how to set this password for the SMTP server. To do this, go to the "Outgoing mail server (SMTP):" section of the accounts page and select "Edit SMTP Server List..." from the drop down menu. Select the server you plan to use, then enter your application specific password in the "Password" field. You must do this every time you change the IMAP password because changing that does not automatically update the SMTP password.