Yosemite Mail still has sync problems with Gmail - any solutions?

I'm seriously losing it soon. After mail actually managed to deliver all emails during the last month, I now discovered that it compensated for the lack of errors by using my not quite that reputable second email address for ALL of my emails, despite having my primary address as default and always sending from the primary account. Really fun if you have sent your job applications from mail.

You have set your SMTP servers incorrectly, correct it, and then check the box that says 'Use Only this Server'

They had been set correctly, I've gone through the whole de-install and install again process and checked everything. And it had worked perfectly fine in the first month, it's just the last weeks that seem to be affected.

Does that mean that you verified that the correct server is specified for each account, and that it is the exclusive server for the account?

At no time did I suggest a reinstallation.

I did not say you suggested a reinstallation. There have been previous discussions about people not getting all mail, and for some a reinstallation fixed the problem. Since I had the same problem, I have previously done a reinstallation during which I among other things checked that I had the correct server specs for each account, that I did not have the setting that automatically changes servers activated, that the servers were used exclusively, and i did verifications for incoming and outgoing servers that worked for my non-gmail accounts, and after several tries as well for both gmail accounts.

I have been battling this for months. Not only does it happen in both my work (gmail for work) email but also my personal gmail (regular gmail). I even went to far as to build an entirely new user in Mac OS to avoid any problems holding over due to settings and such. The problem migrated.

As well, the "uncheck all mail" thing only lasts temporarily, and back the problem comes.

I wonder if more people don't have this problem, they just don't know it.

I find myself keeping both mail.app open and my email accounts open in the Gmail interface. 2-3 times a day, I look through the gmail interface and archive messages from there, then go back to mail and pick "synchronize" to get the account to catch up.

*sigh*

I have the same problem. 4 new iMacs at our office. On one of these machines it is a constant issue. No issue on the rest. Pulling my hair out trying to figure out why?

Please help APPLE!!@@!@

Doug, so far so good for me, also! Something else that is now working that wasn't before is when I reply to a message in my inbox it's moved to both SENT and ALL MAIL (just like "Send+Archive" in the Gmail web app). I am a very happy camper...at least so far.

Just to add to this conversation: The problem with Mail described in this thread has been a problem for me for years. I have spent a long time trying to both understand and deal with it, with varying levels of success and failure over time. At the moment, under 10.10.3, the problem remains. I currently use Gmail, but the same thing used to happen when I was on an Exchange server.

Someone mentioned that there aren't a lot of people reporting this problem, and I'm pretty sure it's because it only affects people that have large archives of e-mail. I am an e-mail packrat, and have 600,000+ messages. The reason for the slowdown is because Mail is continuously syncing and re-syncing e-mailboxes, even those that haven't been changed in months. In the past, I've noticed that problems started happening when I allowed any single e-mail folder to exceed around 10,000 messages, so to avoid the problem I'd break my large e-mail folders into collections of less than 10,000 messages. That usually worked, and when the problem started happening again it was a signal that some folder (usually Trash) was getting large.

I migrated to Gmail less than a year ago, and I thought the problem was fixed, so re-combined some of those folders, and now I have a few that are larger than 100,000 messages. All seemed OK until I upgraded to 10.10.3, and the problem returned. I deleted my Mail Index files and then had Mail rebuild them, and that helped some but didn't solve the problem. If you look at the "Activity" window, located under the "Window" pull-down menu, you will see it syncing and re-syncing, even mailboxes that haven't been touched in months.

One thing that does seem to work is to religiously Quit and Restart Mail at least on a daily basis (I've typically let it run 24/7, since I use it so often). For me, that immediately syncs any unsynced email, and makes things work better for a at least a few hours, if not a few days.

More recently, there is this thread, which seemed to help some people and partially helped me. Other interesting threads are here, here, here, and here, which could be helpful for some.

For those calling out to Apple to fix this, I doubt it's on their radar screen given the limited number of people who are affected. I know from personal experience that this has been a problem for many years, and I've searched and re-searched the discussion forums for a solution for just as long. From my experience, your choices are to (a) live with it, using the accommodations that have been suggested, (b) divide up your e-mail folders to keep them under 10,000-ish messages each, or (c) find another e-mail client that you like.

I am 100% in agreement with FJ9999 and here is why. I used to also be an email pack rat and over the years experienced these Gmail/Mail.app problems like everyone else here. I thought the release of 10.10.3 fixed the problem, but in fact it did not. What most likely did fix it was shortly before updating to 10.10.3 I decided to clean house in email and pared down my 10 years of Gmail to only a couple of thousand relevant messages. After doing this, I have not had one single recurring issue.

So in addition to the suggestions of FJ9999, I would add that you perhaps evaluate just how necessary are the several hundred thousand messages you may have. If not so much, maybe archive them off in a different manner and keep only the truly relevant messages so Gmail will again work as it should with Apple Mail.

Larry,

Very helpful perspective and suggestions. When I transitioned to Gmail, I took much of my old e-mail and put them in separate folders with the intention never to touch them (i.e., never add any more e-mail to that folder). I was hoping that, because those "archive" folders would never change, and incoming e-mail would be added to different folders, Apple Mail would be smart enough not to keep re-syncing those static "archive" folders. Good idea, but I was dead wrong, as the problem persisted.

So, archiving old messages in a different manner, as you suggested, is what I will likely ultimately do. I can't just get rid of them because I actually do need them from time to time. Actually, now that I think about that, I can do that in about 30 seconds simply by telling Gmail to hide those Archive folders with Apple Mail (via Settings > Labels > [Unchecking "Show in IMAP" box], which will preserve those "archive" folders but make them invisible to Apple Mail). The only downside that I can see is that I will no longer be able to do a search through all my e-mail using Apple Mail, but I can still just open up Gmail and use Gmail's search to do that. Hmmm... I think I'll do that and see how it goes.

Thanks again for the additional idea!

I also have a few folders of "saved" messages that I don't let be accessible via IMAP and when I need something from them, I just launch Gmail itself and do a quick search. Usually only adds a few seconds to the work flow, but I'm convinced that a leaner Gmail message base is what now makes Apple Mail work like it should.

I'm another one who has quietly wrestled with this problem, hoping Apple would magically fix it in one of their updates. I will try some of the suggestions above, pare down gmail folders and see if that helps. My personal experience with Apple Mail is that for one of the most fundemental applications on my desktop it has been too glitchy for too long. I sometimes think there must be a war going on behind the scenes between Apple and Google, with the goal of driving people away from their competitors applications. If this is true, Apple is losing. At work I flipped over to the Gmail client, and I am about to at home as well, which is crazy because Mail works fine on my iPhone and iPad, just not my MacBook, iMac, or MacMini.

A slight variation on all this, that I find annoying is that 20% of the time the blue "read" dot will not go away after I open an email in Mail. I've found that re-syncing doesn't help, but if I close the Mail window and reopen it, all the status flags update correctly. Go figure....