mail sound delayed 10.9

Sorry, this is not a solution, but I wanted to second for the same problem. It was already an issue previously, but not to this extent. The delay was a few seconds before. I solved the problem with GrowllMail plugin, but it is not compatible with Mavricks, yet.

I have already sent a complaint through Apple's suggestion site about a month ago. I will send another regarding this worsening of the problem.

Here is the address: https://ssl.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

If enough of us complained, they might be finally willing to fix this problem. All the improvements and new tricks that came with the Mavericks, this tiny annoyance cancells the excitement, it feels like. I would just need to turn off the sound for now, or it is just too distracting.

Hope some one can come up with a solution.

I have the same roblem on both my MavBooks after upgrading to 10.9.😮

Hope someone can help us out or Apple will fix this...

I have the same issue... delayed sound notification on both my Macbook Pro and my iMac. Bot are running Mavericks with all updates.

I'm also having this! It is quite annoying..

I've tried going into mail preferences and turning the sound off and on. Also tried going into the notification preferences and turning the sound off and on there.

Doesn't work 😟

I presume it is a bug

Same here, man. This is madness! How are we supposed to live with this?! #fml

But really, it would be nice to have it working.

Same here, minor annoyance but curious as to why it's happening.

OK, figured out what the issue was on my computer: I have several IMAP email accounts (1 - Gmail and 3 others) plus a couple of POP accounts. By keeping an eye on the Activity mini-window (via menu > Window or command-option-0), I discovered that Mail.app won't play the notification sound until ALL the accounts have finished updating.

So, even if one new email comes in from one of those accounts, the sound alerting me to the fact that I have a new mail won't be played until Mail.app is done checking ALL of the other accounts.

Makes sense.

I don't have an answer either, but I second the problem: It's really ******* frustrating! It doesn't affect my life at all and I guess I wouldn't be happier with the sound in order, but as all Apple owners: We don't have much else to complain about but minor bugs in OSX!

So: I sent a complaint through the form you linked, and hope all goes well.

Peace. // Marcus, Sweden

I tried once to use an AppleScript as a rule as a solution to this problem, forcing Mail to make a sound immediately after it finds new messages. Of course, this lead to (say) 5 alerts for 5 messages, which was quite annoying.

But it's worth noting that although I have disabled GMail and stuck only with one Yahoo and one iCloud acount (both IMAP), there are still some delays, around 5-7 seconds after the visual notification.

All in all, aside from the "feature" (I'm sure it's not meant to be a bug) of playing a sound after ALL of Mail Activity is done, the real problem is that the all the Mail activity seems slow. Of course Mail had this feature in Mountain Lion and before (since playing only one alert for all the new messages is the good way to go), but the sound delays appeared in Mavericks because of Mail (Activity) slowness.

Sorry, not a solution, just my 2 cents.

And yes, I also filed a bug report to Apple, but since they consider this a "feature", rather than a bug, they may think that everything goes as they meant to 🙂

I have been wrestling with this issue of the delayed new mail sound and I have managed to find a fix that works in my situation.

In Mail, I have four accounts. Three are POP accounts via my ISP and the fourth is my gmail account. I noticed that if I deactivated the gmail account, the new mail sound was almost instant. As a further test, I deleted the gmail account which was IMAP and added it again, but as a POP account. Thus all four accounts are now POP.

The result is that the new mail sound now very closely follows the arrival of mail. The very very slight lag is, I assume, due to mail accessing the gmail POP server, as opposed to only the local server at my ISP. This slight lag is barely noticable and is therefore no problem.

I'm unsure how this leaves anyone who prefers to use IMAP, or what the situation might be if all accounts in Mail are IMAP. I do know that a mix of POP and IMAP did bring a delay to my system.

I hope this helps someone.

fyi I am using an early 2009 iMac 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 8GB of RAM, OSX 10.9.1, Mail 7.1

Yep, I heard many times that the IMAP settings are the cause and switching to POP would solve the problem. Also I heard that Gmail was the main devil here. So I quit using GMail (this wasn't the only reason, I had some others too) and I now use only iCloud and Yahoo!. And still I get some delay, around 10 seconds.

But come on, it's more than absurd to give up using some mail accounts or servers that one would normally use just to fix this bug. It's unacceptable, as a "solution"! Apple MUST find a fix, Mountain Lion's Mail had it right!

As I said, I did file a bug report and I ask please all the participants to this thread do the same. Go to Mail > Provide Mail Feedback.

"Yep, I heard many times that the IMAP settings are the cause and switching to POP would solve the problem."

I didn't see anybody reporting this fact anywhere prior to my note above. If they had, I wouldn't have had to spend so much time on the issue until I stumbled upon the answer myself.

You're right, there were no explicit blaims on the IMAP protocol, but there was mentioned that the IDLE comand on the server (and the automatic check for new mail) could be blaimed. Moreover, I thought that having to communicate with all the mailboxes everytime, as IMAP does, rather than storing the mail locally (as POP does) could result in a slow Mail Activity.

These were my deductions from which it followed that POP shouldn't have this problem. But I have to admit that they may be empirical or simply wrong, because my experience is scarce with mail/networking.

Nonetheless, my conclusion remains: one should not accept as a solution changing the email protocol or even provider. So Apple must find what they did wrong in 10.9, because Mountain Lion didn't have this problem.

I agree. Apple should fix it.