Mavericks Mail App and Gmail folders

Hi Patrix,

Now I'm concerned about Airmail!

It seems if I get a reply to a conversation and delete the reply it deletes the entire conversation - including my sent emails.

That never happened in Apple Mail. If I deleted a message, certainly my sent emails were never affected.

But in Airmail, sent emails which were part of discussions I deleted are actually no long in the Sent folder, so I think it's true. I noticed that when searching for a sent email this morning and it didn't come up in search. But I found it under the Trash label with the discussion.

If so, this is awful. I wonder how many of my sent emails I've deleted the last few days.

Agh!

I tried Postbox just before. It was taking forever to create my accounts and so I stopped because while waiting I read that Postbox doesn't play well with Time Machine.

What do you think?

What does Postbox have that Apple Mail doesn't?

Right now I have no email open at all because I'm scared about what Airmail is doing to my Sent mail and worried about how many Sent mails I may have lost the last few days. Postbox doesn't do that, does it?

I'm like you in that I have multiple accounts (4 Gmail + 2 Hostgator). I am not necessarily enamored of the Airmail appearance. I want to be able to filter and search easily.

One thing I did like about Airmail was the easy ability to add labels/tags to everything and with keyboard shortcuts you could easily archive.

But there are weird things too, like no user manual, and no explanation of what the difference is between folders and labels.

doug

Hey Doug,

I'm not sure about the issue you're having with Airmail deleting the entire conversation, becuase I didn't test it throughly.

The best things I'm experiencing right now about Postbox are:

• Cleaner interface
• Accounts list on the top left - (switch faster between accounts)
• Advanced filters (From the menu View > Show > Focus Pane) - shows a 3rd column with favorite topics (personal labels) - favorite contacts, date and attributes
• Shortcut Quick move messages - press V (move to folder) - press A (Archive)
• You can create personal labels - and use shortcut (1 - 2 - 3 from the keyboard) - I use this for those messages labeled (Important - To Do Next - Waiting Response) (this is not reflected on gmail, it's only a personal labeling from Postbox, which keeps messages in the inbox)
• Smaller Font, more messages on my screen
• Messages can be marked as To Do, or As Pending (which shows a small clock icon near the message)
• It also support the "Important" folder natively from Gmail.

So the difference between labels and tags is tricky and confusing. As you know Gmail uses labels (folders) and a message can have multiple labels, which means can be in multiple folders (not like any other IMAP)....

In Postbox, you also have topics which are practically tags. They don't affect anything on Gmail, but are a purely additional way to sort messages inside of Postbox among multiple accounts.

In regards of Time Machine, I'm not sure either. Probably there were problems with the previous Postbox version. The 3.0 seems to be fine.

Hope this helps.

Patrix

Thanks, Patrix.

I'm not sure if it helps or overloads with extra information, but definitely interesting. 🙂

Thanks,

doug

Ahah, that's true.

You're really welcome, Doug.

Patrix

After intially having this issue, it now appears to have cleared up without me doing anything. I had decided to leave it until a decent resolution turned up - I've wasted far too much time in the past on such things, good thing I did.

I can only assume that it's been doing something in the background updating the many gigs of data I have, reindexing or whoknowswhat.

Result is I can move emails to mailboxes (aka folders, aka labels) without them re-appearing when I switch between my mailboxes.

I too, for the time being, at least for tonight, have returned to Mail. My main issue was the long pause before Inboxes displayed when changing accounts. I'm living with that for now. I'm too worried about Airmail deleting my sent email, until they get back to me about that.

doug

Mail has additional problems though. It's not reliably fetching mail from Gmail. I can see new email in Gmail directly. And I can see it with other email clients. There are 3 new emails sitting there for more than 45 minutes, unread. But they are not coming into Apple Mail, even with a manual fetch.

Also, items I red flag don't get red flagged until I leave the mailbox and return.

I'm in a quandary as to what I should do about mail on my Mac at this point. I wish I had never upgraded to Mavericks. I can't think of even one Mavericks feature I am using.

doug

New Gmail is now up to 7 unread messages. I can see them via webmail. I can see them in iOS 7 mail on my iPhone. But they just aren't coming in to Mavericks mail.

I wonder what I should do at this point.

Apple Mail is clearly not working well.

Airmail deletes emails from my Sent. folder.

Depressing.

doug

Apparently, it is not so simple to write a good email client.

"All mail clients suck. This one just ***** less." — Michael R. Elkins, author of the email client Mutt.

Bark!

[And yes I can verify that Mutt is great, but it's a text-based email client. So not as useful for people who send and receive a lot of HTML, photos, etc.]

We all seem to be having the same problem. Is anyone at Apple listening and working on fixing this bug? What is the timing for this fix?

Actually we all seems to be having lots of problems.

At the present time I don't feel I have a reliable email client on my Mac, which is depressing.

I withdraw my recommendation of Airmail at this time. There are too many strange things going on with that app as well. In particular, my discovery that it is deleting SENT email whenever I delete a new response to a thread containing that email is very disturbing. This is something Apple Mail does right at least. Consider this scenario: You are subscribed to a mailing list. You add a contribution. You may not want to keep every single reply that comes into a thread (e.g. "me too" or "I disagree"). So you delete those extra posts. You would not expect deleting such posts to move your sent contribution into the trash! But that is just what Airmail is doing!

So I feel too uncertain about Airmail right now until that is fixed.

But meanwhile back in Mavericks Mail I can't be sure that I'm actually getting my mail! Mails I can see in Gmail directly, or even in iOS 7 Mail, simplly are not coming in to Mac mail!

What's a person to do?

doug

Chris Zweigenthal wrote:

We all seem to be having the same problem. Is anyone at Apple listening and working on fixing this bug? What is the timing for this fix?

I'm not seeing the issues you all have reported, and I imagine there are also a lot of other people not having any problem who are not posting as you don't usually take time out of your day to come and say yours works like it used to.

The question is why do some people have no problem, while others have lots of problems. That is extremely difficult to determine. I can't explain it beyond some thinking it has to do with showing the All Mail folder. I don't. Never have. When I delete an email, I want it gone. So, I disabled that "feature" a long time ago.

I have also previously mapped my Junk, Drafts, and Sent mail to the appropriate "unified" mailboxes. I have learned from these forums that many people did not know how to do that and always had separate mailboxes, one on their Mac and one on Google's servers. Mavericks maps them correctly when you set up an account, and it may also do so when you upgrade (but I don't know as I always had mine set up correctly).

Then you have to account for Google's translation of "labels" into folders (IMAP standard). I'm not sure if Mail is trying to process those and "label"/"unlabel" the "folders" when it moves or deletes. I would hope not. Google should be doing that on their end as they are advertising it as IMAP, so it should respond as an IMAP server should.

You can use another client, but if it is not designed to work with Gmail's non-standard IMAP implementation, then you will likely run into other, similar problems.

It is absolutely unacceptable that Apple does not care at this point of its customers. They are very brillant to sell us their news and make us virtual prisoners of their products, but there is no true spirit of disclosure and transparency. We are forced to wait or hope for a possible correction... But until when? Tomorrow? Within a week? In a year? Are they only going to be concerned about the issue? How can we be reassured about the future of relations between Mail and Gmail?

Gattopardi wrote:

It is absolutely unacceptable that Apple does not care at this point of its customers. They are very brillant to sell us their news and make us virtual prisoners of their products, but there is no true spirit of disclosure and transparency. We are forced to wait or hope for a possible correction... But until when? Tomorrow? Within a week? In a year? Are they only going to be concerned about the issue? How can we be reassured about the future of relations between Mail and Gmail?

You don't. This is the way it has been forever. Some people think their problems are universal, so Apple must be working on a fix. That likely isn't true. Your problems are not universal. They may be happening to a lot of people, but that doesn't indicate a universal problem caused by the OS. As long as Gmail does not function as a true IMAP email server, there will always be problems with Mail and Gmail.

Not sure if it is related, this thread has identified some problems with the account upgrades: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5474940?tstart=0