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El Capitan killed my Gmail pop setup

Hi,


I had my Gmail set up as POP before I upgraded to El Capitan. Since upgrading, the mail program hasn't been able to access my Gmail POP account. The IMAP accounts I have at Gmail and the others elsewhere, IMAP and POP, work fine.


I'd rather not have an IMAP account. I hate that it downloads mail without my checking it first. I use either the Gmail website or a menubar app called Mail Tab to check my mail before i download it. I don't get much spam but the last line of defense is checking it before I download it, thus the POP setup.


Mail assumes you want to set up an IMAP account when you set up a Gmail account in it. There is a way to get it to let you choose POP but so far, I'm not getting it to work. I keep getting an "unable to verify account name or password" message from the Mail Internet Account pane. I tried setting up a new account but continued to get that message. There was talk about using the control key to get Mail to give me a "Next" button instead of assuming I want to set up an IMAP account but I am not getting that to work either.


I have things properly setup at Gmail. It all worked before I upgraded to 10.11.


So, any ideas on how I get POP to work for Gmail would be appreciated.


Thanks.


Cheers,


John L

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11)

Posted on Sep 30, 2015 2:30 PM

Reply
44 replies

Sep 30, 2015 7:55 PM in response to lipwak

I am dealing with the exact same problem. I cannot get POP to work with Google at all and it keeps giving me the "unable to verify account name or password" error message on setup of the account.


Very frustrating as I do not want to use IMAP on my iMac as I curate my emails first on the web then download to my mac using POP.


Any ideas???

Oct 1, 2015 8:02 AM in response to BritinUSA

I put in the pop.gmail.com address to search for in Keychain Access. It saw my password that was changed yesterday. I looked at access control. It said I couldn't edit that info and had "Apple" shaded out as the sole entry for the access group for that item.


So, that didn't lead anywhere but it was worth looking into. Thanks.

Oct 1, 2015 2:09 PM in response to davidcotter

A ha! Not only do you have to do that, but wait until you get an e-mail from Google telling you that you are now less secure, did you really want to do that? When I first made that change today, I tried again and it didn't work. Once I got the e-mail, about a minute later today, it worked! I got an e-mail saying that yesterday but it arrived or was sent much later and I'd already turned it back off so trying to get POP to work then was futile.


So, our Google accounts are less secure as POP is less secure than IMAP but also one's Google account is now more susceptible to being hacked. OK. So far it's been ok for me.


Thank you, David.


PS The "Allow less secure apps" option is under the Connected Apps and Sites category, under Sign In and Security, on the left. You'd left that out.

Oct 1, 2015 2:51 PM in response to lipwak

And I don't know about anyone else but now I am getting old mail downloading again! Mail from 2011! Groups of about 400 at a time. I erase them and a few minutes later another batch from about the same time as the others comes in. (Sent mail..., not mail to me...)


I made inactive my Gmail IMAP account. According to the accounts tab in Mail, I only have 3 POP accounts active. According to the Internet Accounts pane of System Preferences, I have 5 Mail accounts active, of which 3 are the known active POP accounts in Mail and the other two are inactive POP accounts. Those other two are not what I am getting mail from now as they were only set up this year. I could uncheck them from Mail in the Internet Accounts pane but that shouldn't affect all this new old mail I'm getting...


I realize this is a new issue so it deserves a new thread and I'll deal with it but if anyone has any ideas, I'd love to know about them. Thanks.


(Up to 2676 messages so far and counting...)


And it's now not downloading my most recent messages... Weird.

Oct 1, 2015 3:20 PM in response to davidcotter

my switch to "Allow less secure apps" was already on.

I received the email from google when I signed in earlier online to gmail.

I'm getting incoming mail but connection doctor is still showing my pop3 accounts as offline.

Am managing to send out gmail through a secondary email account that I have set up but the problem with this is that of course gmail is not keeping a record of sent emails when I access all mail on my phone etc ...

Oct 1, 2015 3:39 PM in response to lipwak

And it's interesting that an OS update caused this to happen. The setting is on Google's end. How does an update on our OS cause this setting to change? I don't remember but I probably had to do that setting earlier.


And Jeremy, I wanted to mark your 6:06pm comment as being helpful, not the one I did. Apple won't let me mark it though... nor edit my first comment. I don't get either of those situations....


***


Update


My current mail is being downloaded without my "getting" it. (Acting like IMAP) I know I changed some settings. Now to figure out which ones so that will stop.

Oct 1, 2015 5:51 PM in response to Roving Eye

Fixed: Unchecked the "include when automatically checking for new messages." You'd think it wouldn't be checking by itself when that is checked (since I have the General preference set to check for new messages manually, but it was... (Still sounds like IMAP behavior...) Now I get mail only when I hit the Get Mail button. As it should be. All is well.

El Capitan killed my Gmail pop setup

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