Disable the Push IMAP (IDLE) email in macOS Sierra

This option was shown in previous versions , in Mac OS High Sierra see this article Automatically manage connection settings in Mail on your Mac - Apple Support

You are avoiding to push mails automatically but for some reason , in the article it is stating it should be left as turned on to function the mail application properly .

Aha! You have finally explained why I keep seeing lots of activity and then Mail stalling and crashing. I trashed and recreated the plist file, and it was better for a while and then recurred. I may have to go back to my POP account for a while. 😟

This is absolutely absurd! Since updating to Sierra and High Sierra 3 of my websites keep going offline due to this Mac Mail problem that cannot be resolved! *** Apple?? You have cost me thousands of dollars in lost sales for my sites being down over 470 minutes in the past week. What is the solution??

I also am experiencing outages on my WordPress websites while I'm working on them and have Mail open at the same time. My ISP, Lunarpages has suggested I always quit Mail while working on my sites. Can Apple ever get Mail right?

That's not the answer in MacOS Sierra or High Sierra— there is no way to turn off the PUSH feature, but I found the solution! I have reverted all four of my Macs to El Capitan, which was a huge hassle to do so because of all the roadblocks Apple has put in the way to prevent it. Using POP is a big hassle and I have dozens of email addresses from six different domains so IMAP is the best way for me to go. I've been a mac owner/user since 1985 and I have to say Apple just keeps making it worse, more like the dreaded Windows, maybe worse than that. I wish there was a viable and serious third choice, but just like politics in this country it doesn't exist. It's always the lesser of two evils.

You are comparing Mac OS X ELCapitan and Mac OS Sierra or High Sierra , apple software engineers have an answer for it , we all here are Mac users and will accept the settings and let the mail application work in a normal way for us .

There is a link posted for feed back in the thread , you can follow it .

Thanks for your reply. But I do not understand what you mean by "accept the settings and let the mail application work in a normal way"— that's what I was doing when my sites kept going down, sometimes for more than an hour at a time. I still have found no answer to the problem, What is the answer "Apple software engineers have"? If there is an answer can they please simply state it. Is there a UNIX command that fixes it? I read the various links posted and they do not address the problem, but then you know the "engineers" keep changing the nomenclature and processes so it's hard to know how one thing relates to another. There seems to be no equivalent of the check box in earlier versions of Mail for "Use IDLE command" that can be unchecked and solve the problem. A very simple and elegant solution that the "engineers" have decided to simply do away with. Capiche?

I am a Mac user just like yourself , as observed when new versions are there some changes are seen in it , forum rules do not permit to discuss more about them , you can discuss with apple support .

Unix commands are to avoided .

When a new email arrives at your mail server, it is automatically delivered (pushed) to your email client. In a nutshell, if your email service supports push email and you have a client which supports the same, you'll receive emails instantly.

You can select work offline if you don't want to receive regular downloads.

Other than selecting to work offline, Apple seems to have removed that option.

I suggest you send Apple Feedback.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Microsoft Outlook 2016 still has the option for IDLE. You might want to check out these email apps: Postbox and MailMate. Both have demos. I don't have installed to check options.

http://www.postbox-inc.com/

http://freron.com

MailMate does not support POP.

Note: Microsoft Outlook does not sync to iCloud contacts and calendars.

You can select work offline if you don't want to receive regular downloads.

Turning on the offline mode has been broken since El Capitan. I have emailed Apple a few times about this and spoken to one rep at length, but there seems to be no fix in the works.

The problem is that taking an account offline does not keep the account offline if you do anything within the inbox. Just clicking on an email in the inbox will take the account back online - and thus initiates automatic downloads again.

I have been using Mail for nearly a decade, and Take Accounts Offline has always kept accounts fully offline (no sending or receiving) until the user manually turned the accounts back online. But since El Cap any action within the Inbox has taken the account online.

This was causing enough damage to my workflow that I reverted back to Yosemite. I really do hope Apple fixes this. But I don't think enough people rely on this feature to have spoken up about it.

I have another reason to turn off Idle: Mail appears to be abandoning (but not closing) idle connections and creating new ones. Over time the connections to the server pile up, to the point that they exhaust the server's allowable connection count.

Perhaps there is a config file in the guts where this can be turned off? Doesn't have to be GUI.