Can't get Mail in Mavericks

In my experience, each new iteration of Mail under Mavericks fixes something and breaks something else. At various times, it was working practically not at all. Prior to 10.9.2, I had fiddled with settings both on my Gmail accounts and in Mail so everything was working EXCEPT, for some reason, several options under Mailbox Behaviors were greyed out, resulting in the delete key sending mail to All Mail for two of my Gmail accounts, and to Trash for the two others.

WIth 10.9,2, the options were no longer greyed out so I got that settled.. and now, with 10.9,2, Mail isn't retrieving new messages, even after closing it, taking it offline, etc. My new messages are on my iPhone and iPad, but not on Mail.

The decent thing for Apple to do would be to make it very simple for us to revert to a previous version of the OS. I would dump Mavericks in a second.

So it's been about a week now since 10.9.2, and today Mail went catatonic again...although it has been working.

Except for this, 10.9.2 Mail feels a little zippier too. Maybe that's a symptom of whatever they're fixing, but previously, Mail seemed rather sluggish, server syncs were sluggish (or maybe were not completing) and it behaved strangely when syncing with the server...like if I tried to open a new email around the time it was checking with the server, Mails that I had trashed would come back, and the email I was trying to open would be marked as read, but would not open. It's like the email open interrupted the server sync, so it abandoned the server sync.

This is all with a GoDaddy IMAP account.

adding to the pile...

My GoDaddy POP account hasn't worked since 02Jan2014

Upgraded to Mavricks on 12Jan2014 (also does not work on a mini, but used to, that is running ML)

Still doesn't work through 10.9.2, although, my HotMail and GMail have worked all along

As of 03March2014 GMail stopped (no apparent system changes)

All of these work fine on my iPad and iPhone

Missing Steve and bad...

This did the trick ..thank you thank you

Couple of weeks already since Mail has been working just fine! Even without any updates installed - one day it just started working well

A workaround from having to shut down and open Mail is to Un-hide the Mailboxes toolbar on the left, right-click on the offending IMAP account and choose "Syncronize ..." This will pull in emails waiting on the server. Still not ideal, but more accessible.

The feeling of lowered expectations of quality and being more and more out of touch with their customers I was so accustomed to with Microsoft products (and a huge reason for going to Apple) has taken root. Feels like the end of an era.

I tried everything suggested here and nothing worked. Finally, I just went to Comcast's website. I clicked login and then said that I forgot my password. It prompted me with my security questions, and then I reset the password to the same password (I didn't change it at all). After I did that, my mail worked on my MacBook Air and my iPhone5.

I have had the issue the last two weeks, it continues to pompt me for my password, saying bad login or password, I can access my exchange account through web access just fine so I know my password is valid, I have tried several things, deleted Keychain, delete ALL accounts, tried loading them one at a time, of course my Me.com ( I cloud account) sets up fine, just the exchange, I also have Outlook for Mac and it does the same thing there.......called apple, no help....what is weird is my friend has a Mac Pro and we can put my exchange email on his just fine, it is just on my computer!!

I solve this problem on my computer by disabling upload bandwidth hogging applications. My upload bandwidth is very much throttled by my ISP, and if I'm uploading a lot, then Mail fails in connecting to my accounts. Sometimes, I have to live with it (like when I'm uploading a photo or video), and other times I've eliminated certain applications (like Google Music uploader) because they just eat too much upstream bandwidth.

TLDR; Check if there's something on your system that's using a lot of upload bandwidth, disable that and check Mail again.

Possible solution (for me at least). My mail is an IMAP account hosted by GoDaddy.

1. Snapshotted my Mail account settings
2. Exit Mail
3. Ran a backup
4. Deleted my mail account from Settings / Internet Accounts.
5. Launched Mail to see that account was gone. Exited Mail.
6. Went back into Settings / Internet Accounts and re-added my Mail account
7. Launch Mail, set all Mail account settings back to the settings I had

Mail has been working smoothly for 24 hours now. No stalls or failures to update. Fingers crossed.

It's been almost 5 days now, here's an update.

I think this helped, but it's still not right. Mail seems to go into a deep sleep after some period of time and stops updating. However, now it will eventually come out of it's deep sleep if I start using it...like if I send an email or read old emails. The app takes a minute or two to shake off the cobwebs and suddenly goes and checks and wow, sometimes finds a lot of new messages (and others that have been moved to various IMAP folders).

If I do Mailbox/Sync, it will wake up also. So I don't have to quit and restart.

But this is still not right. I can't depend on my MacBook Pro to alert me to new email - I never know if it's really up to date or if it's just in a coma again...or still.

FWIW, I leave it up and running 24 hours. The computer is set to never sleep, but the hard disk does sleep.

AZPflyer, thank you!!

That worked for me as well! Finally my mail works again.

Before I tried to make the accounts inactive and set up the new account again - doesn't help.

So you actually have to DELETE the account as you said. To do that press "minus" button below the list of existing accounts. After that make sure the account has disappeared from both Mail and Internet Accounts.

After that set up your account again.

By the way no need to back up if you have IMAP because all messages are kept on the server and they will come back as soon you set up your account again.

Thanks again!

I made my conclusions too early 😟

After an hour or so all the same again - "incorrect password" and "too many simultaneous connections"

Me too, I am frustrated, 10.9.4 POP, it hints bad password but I KNOW the password is right. Icloud works, internet is solid, web, ftp works. Apple, please fix mail, it has fatal bugs - many people cannot connect to their ISPs.

This is the second time I've used this great fix. There are loads of other suggestions but this one definitely works for me. Thank you very much Joseph! I lost half a day but this fix saved me losing more!

Apple - please sort this out. Outlook is less buggy. I just don't like the way it looks.