My gmail inbox (in Apple Mail) is empty and does not show incoming emails on my MacBook. I can send messages and they show in sent. I also have my gmail in my inbox on my iPad and Iphone and the inbox is fine.

i found the solution from Jerome Perakis blog. Thanks

http://jeromeperakis.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/solving-gmail-imap-empty-inbox-in-a pple.html

Solving Gmail IMAP empty inbox in Apple Mail 5

Man! Took me a long evening and finally a portion of this morning to solve the following issue between my Google Apps Gmail Account synchronized with the Apple Mail 5 client over IMAP...

When creating the account, I had briefly seen my messages in my Google Apps account's inbox, but then the rest of the account folders were displaying the messages, I couldn't see the messages anymore neither in the account's inbox folder nor in the All accounts' combined inbox...

I had found several instructions how to setup the Gmail account and also others complaining about this issue, but nothing to solve it. Of course, start with the following instructions to setup Apple Mail 4, they are the same for the version 5. Nevertheless, if you cannot see the messages in the inbox, despite showing in your gmail account through your favorite browser, check this:

1. Check in Apple Mail whether you have sub-folders below the inbox (you will have a small little triangle on the left of the inbox icon).
2. If you have those sub-folders, go to gmail directly and check whether you have label's names which start with inbox/something.
3. If that's the case, in many cases, they have been created out of previous migration from another client e.g. Outlook migrated to Gmail... they are considered as sub-folders in IMAP and it seems that Apple Mail is lost and cannot retrieve the inbox content in the such case.
4. So from Gmail, select all related messages tagged with this label and move them to another folder.
5. Once done, get back to Apple Mail, and select the menu Mailbox - Rebuild
6. Your inbox should start displaying your messages and same for the combined inboxes
7. Enjoy!

Had the same issue. Inbox items and sub-folders from my Gmail account were not appearing in Mac Mail. I went back to Outlook on my other machine, moved the sub-folders out from under the Inbox and into the root Gmail folder. I then re-started my email client and everything works perfectly. Thanks for the tip.

Thank you!!!!

I just had this occur to me with my Yahoo IMAP in Apple Mail v6.5 on OS 10.8.4 (Mountain Lion) and the solution above worked there.

This is after trying all the deletion of ~/Library/Mail files etc suggested on other forums with no luck ..

hello,

you seem to know alot 😉

so, i had the above issue and rebuilt that mailbox and it seems to be working (although the smtp server for that account says 'offline' although it isn't).

my main issue now is that my other gmail account is on my macbook, and can send and receive BUT it doesn't actually receive the email, if that makes sense. there is no error message or symbol next to that folder. i can't figure out where the hang up is: i have it in a POP setting now (my other gmail is an IMAP account), with IMAP disabled. no filters. can't really figure out the hierarchy of the folders on google-- things go to the 'all mail' folder that ought to be in the inbox-- but no sense of how to fix these things.

at any rate, i can't figure out of this INBOX issue on my macmail gmail acct is at the mac end, or the gmail end. i feel it's on the gmail end, but can't figure out where. any thoughts?

thanks

ok still begging for help, lay person please.

went into labels in gmail and kept only 'inbox/imap', sent, trash. i'm still sending emails successfully from my mac and having the email LAND NOWHERE, NOT EVEN ON THE GMAIL SERVER. it's only showing up as 'sent mail'.

i'm at my wit's end here.