no mail sounds after installing El Capitan

Try disabling any rules that play a sound and see if that brings back the default sounds.

Thanks for trying, but unfortunately this does not work, at least in my case. My problems are identical to itwontletme, so I'm afraid the difficulty remains with Apple.

What I wanna know is why we had to wait for three separate updates in order to get at least one. There was the OS 10.11.2 update, the iOS 9.2 update, and a tvOS 9.1 update all released at the same time. What are the odds that all of them were complete and ready for release at the exact same time?

AND, the new feature in Mail 9.2 that allows users to send large attachments using Mail Drop only works with IMAP accounts. It's not even offered for POP accounts. WTH is up with that?

I have no rules that play a sound.

My sounds have been erratic even through the different public betas. I found that turning off my rules that play custom sounds when I receive an email from a group has helped.

I suggest you test in a new User to eliminate any issues in your User's account.

You can use the Guest User, but if you want to do further testing I would create a new User for testing. When you log out of Guest, it deletes everything.

CREATE A NEW USER

Go to System Preferences --> Create a New User in Users & Groups.

Switch to the New User by logging out/in or use Fast User Switching.

You can skip signing in with an Apple ID unless you want to test your iCloud email.

Open Mail and add one account for testing.

This feels like going down the rabbit hole.

I have had a second user account for a long time. I seldom use it, so I am not that familiar with how Mail looks there compared to how it looks in my usual account. But it does not look familiar. I cannot send any mail now using it. So I cannot test how it behaves.

I do notice one thing though, for Mail in both user accounts. I have two Mail accounts, and for the most used of them, under Preferences > Accounts > Advanced > Authentication it now shows External (TLS client Certificate). I am unfamiliar with this term. I don't think it was there before Yosemite.

My experience has been that the first download after opening Mail does not produce the selected incoming mail sound, but if you have Mail checking for messages at given intervals, the next and all subsequent downloads produce the selected incoming mail sound. And yes, if you delete a message on the initial download, the selected incoming mail sound will occur.

I just updated to 10.11.2 and have been doing a further examination but

I'm still not sure what exactly causes this issue.

Both of my former analyses seem to be wrong. I'm sorry for that.

Now I'm thinking of switching to IMAP servers.

The other thing that seems to be happening, quite unrelated to the sound issue, is that mail in the trash is no longer being deleted, even though "after one day" has been selected. This wasn't the case prior to the upgrade.

Anybody else having this problem?

Well, looking at my Trash I see one post dated 12/1, and it's set to erase deleted posts after one week. So, it appears that things aren't functioning as intended. Evidently, that Trash setting was was working correctly prior to the 10.11.2 update because the 12/1 post is the oldest in that box. I'm not a programmer, but fixing one issue while introducing others is a PITA for users.

My new posts alert sound works correctly, but I still get utter silence if I manually click on Get Mail and there's nothing new coming in. Yes, I'm glad to have the new post alert working again, even though I would prefer to have everything working as it should. It's rather obvious that Steve Jobs has left the building.

Isn't catching these things what beta testing is all about? You're right about Jobs. I don't think this sloppiness would have happened under him.

One would certainly assume that 5 beta tests would insure a final release to be more trouble free. I had hopes for Cook, but he is not up to the challenge of being the CEO.

Everything is fixed for me. Both incoming and outgoing notifcation sounds -- and I have an IMAP email account.

I have two e-mail service providers. One is Comcast, and Comcast is also my Internet provider. I do not use this e-mail account often, and get little mail through it. The Comcast account is POP.

The other e-mail account is with my Apple user group; it is the account I use most often, and have done for years. My account there has been POP also. Yesterday I created another account with this provider -- an IMAP account. So now I have two accounts with that same provider -- one IMAP and one POP.

I don't know if I can create an IMAP account with Comcast.

I do not know Mail well enough to know how to manage what I have now. The IMAP account seems to get mail automatically, even though Preferences > General is set to get mail manually.

If I set the POP account to inactive, immediately all the messages in Mail mailboxes on my Mac, which have been received or sent using the POP account, disappear. If I enable that account again, those messages re-appear. The two accounts, IMAP and POP, do seem to interact when receiving mail now. I think it would be better to disable the POP account, but then all previous messages will be lost. I did archive all the messages in the Inbox, but where will the old messages in the Sent box go if I archive them? Will archiving them create another Archive mailbox, or will it add them to the Incoming mail I have archived now?

All this as a result of the Yosemite update. I have never had trouble such as this with any system update before.

OK -- I archived the contents of the inbox and the sent mail box -- they seem to combine in one archive mailbox -- with the messages interwoven into their threads.

Now with my user group POP account disabled, I get no sound for getting mail if there is no mail to be gotten. I get the outgoing mail sound when I send mail. If I send myself a test message using my user group account, it immediately gets retrieved as incoming mail, with the appropriate sound.

If I send a test message from my Comcast account to my user group account, it also immediately gets retrieved (with sound), I presume via the IMAP account.

If I send a test message to my Comcast (POP) account from my user group mail account, it gets sent (with sound) but not immediately retrieved. If I then get mail manually, the mail from Comcast gets retrieved, but with no incoming mail sound. If I delete a message, the incoming mail sound then plays.

Testing in real time using the support community board to report the results!