Anyone else with no sound in Mail?

Monday 24th April, a/noon:

In some spare moments over the weekend I managed to swap around the data on various of my USB sticks in order to release for usage a 32GB one. I duly prepared the stick as per https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202796 page 2 (the case of using OSX Yosemite or earlier).

Around midday today I got back to working on this 'project'. I plugged in the Install macOS Sierra stick alongside the 32GB one and then restarted the Mac with Opt held down. This gave me the familiar 'select disk' screen and I duly chose Install macOS Sierra. It gave me access to the Install macOS option in macOS Utilities. Having chosen that, I was asked to pick from the various drives which one to be the destination drive, and of course I was very careful to select the 32GB stick. This time it worked; no message about there not being enough room on the drive.

From thereon, however, things went downhill. It started what was described as 'the install' and this went on for about 7 mins, with just the Apple logo and a progress bar onscreen. It seemed to complete that, but then the screen blanked for around a minute, after which it started a new install of some kind, with another progress bar. It said that this would complete in 15 mins. In fact, it took 1.5 hrs! During that period I could see from the destination drive's activity indicator that data was continously passing to/from it. The progress was so slow that several times I almost aborted the exercise, the only thing stopping me being that there was no means available to cleanly quit or cancel it.

When it finally completed the so-called 15 mins, it started yet another progress bar (saying again that this was 'installing') which did indeed persist for another true 15 mins, but then the screen blanked and stayed that way for a few more minutes, during which the ubiquitous Apple spinning wheel appeared on the screen. Then it returned to the progress bar again. Some minutes into that and a female voice sounded, asking about Voiceover (at that point I could opt to have it by pressing a certain control key). I declined and the 'progress' continued.

This absurd set of affairs persisted for another 10 or 20 mins, during which there were some short sporadic transfers to the destination drive, but overall the progress bar showed no perceptible change.

After having struggled with it for over 2 hrs I gave up on it. Unfortunately, there was no means to quit the situation, since all I had was a blank screen with a progress bar. I even tried Cmd-Opt-Esc but apparently that only helps if it's an actual application that's not responding, not OSX itself. So, all I could do was to physically remove the two USB sticks from their ports - something I hate doing because it can corrupt the data on them if you don't dismount them properly, and which has now almost certainly corrupted the destination drive anyway - and then power off using the switch on the back of the iMac.

Fortunately, the Mac's booted up okay into Mavericks. But yes, overall, a complete disaster. Remember, this was just to transfer Sierra to a bootable USB stick.

As to why the exercise failed, well I offer these thoughts:

1. Mavericks itself might have been at fault. It's hard to say. Perhaps I wouldn't have had these problems if I was going from, say, Yosemite or El Capitan to Sierra?

2. I had to use my powered USB hub. There are only 4 USB ports on the iMac and all of them were already in use with wired keyboard, mouse, backup drive, etc. The powered hub's a reliable 3.0 one, made by Startech; I use it all the time, but there might have been some aspect of its operation that didn't suit this exercise. Although the hub's 3.0, the only sticks I had to hand were 2.0 ones. (Last week I bought a 16 GB 3.0 one, but apparently that wasn't big enough!). Nevertheless, I think you'll agree that, even at 2.0 speeds, read/write transfers of around 5 or 6 GB shouldn't take hours.

Si, if you yourself want to give it a go, then do, by all means. But clearly in my case it simply didn't work out. I ran out of patience in the end. I was, in the end, just sitting there waiting, with nothing happening. No harm appears to have been done to the Mac by my having aborted in such a brutal way. I'm philosophical about it, as they say. I'll just have to wipe the two sticks and use them for something else instead.

Yes, I rather agree with your last sentence, in that Apple nowadays probably place more importance on IMAP accounts than on traditional POP accounts.

You and I, and others if they so wish, could complain to Apple via http://www.apple.com/feedback. Over the last few years I've used that to inform Apple about various hard bugs in OSX I've encountered. It's a one-way street, though - Apple say they welcome feedback using that address but they can't indulge in responses.

Si,

Thanks for your commiserations on this. Yes, I think maybe us desktop-only users who've no need for IMAP and who, in any event, prefer POP mail are a dying breed. That being the case, I could well imagine that the Sierra developers have been giving less and less attention to the actual functionality and integrity of POP e-mail in Apple Mail as OSX has been successively upgraded over recent years to its next version.

Eric, the previous respondent, by implication pointed to the need to Shut Down the Mac, rather than just Restart it, for getting the machine into Safe Mode. But I've now tried that and it makes no difference at all whether you use Restart or Shut Down. In Safe Mode I found no difference anyway in the functioning of my Mail account as per these alert sounds; they remain steadfastly silent.

I'm loath to use Etrecheck. It could well screw up my Mac even further, as there are several other quite major issues at hand, not least that, on my machine at present, Time Machine's configuration settings are easily lost/corrupted, eg. if I do a restart, the TM status of the requisite disk is lost. But if I then re-enter TM in Sys Preferences to re-assign TM, not only does the disk icon not turn green but also the lock/unlock icon for TM is permanently gone. The only way I've found to retrieve TM's lock/unlock icon is to run First Aid on the TM disk.

It's interesting what you say about Notifications (presumably that's in the context of Sierra?), because I've experimented at length with the setting for Mail in Notifications but to no avail. And annoyingly, whenever I configure the time settings to my own in Do Not Disturb (one of the many other category settings in Notifications), the times go back to the default ones when you leave that app. Furthermore, the two primary settings for Notifications - namely, NIGHT SHIFT and DO NOT DISTURB - are left with Night Shift Off = Off, and Do Not Disturb = On. And yet, underneath DO NOT DISTURB it says 'Will turn off at 23:59'. There are some double-negatives going on there. surely? It's all totally ambiguous. It worked fine in Mavericks; why didn't they just leave it alone!?

With all the other things I'm now finding that don't work under Sierra, or only sometimes work, I'm inclined to contact Apple directly about it. There used to be a menu bar- selectable setting for feeding back performance info to Apple but even that's not available under Sierra now.

Actually, your latest forum reply (above) came in while I was once again experimenting with Notifications. I've still concluded that its settings aren't totally logical; there are badly-couched double-negatives at play, and it may well be that the developer of Notifications for Sierra was even confused in his/her own mind about them. I think you'll agree that, where the Web's concerned, avoiding ambiguity is of paramount importance. Anyway, the impression I've got is that the Mail settings in Notifications have no bearing on Mail itself; that's to say, any incoming e-mails into Mail's inbox are simply copied into Notifications, for use there if required, with a short preview of the message showing at top-right of screen; it's merely an alert; Notifications seems to play no part in how Mail itself functions.

As for third-party additions, no there are absolutely none installed.

Incidentally, something worth knowing is that when you do a 'clean install' of the OS, as I did - that's to say, using Cmd-Opt-R rather than just Cmd-R - you don't achieve a brand new copy of the OS. Because on a Mavericks machine the Recovery mechanism preserves some existing user settings, what it actually downloads from the Apple server is merely the core parts of the OS , plus a few assorted bits and pieces of the OS. Apple has published info about this. Just to illustrate the validity of this, when I first got Sierra up and running and opened Safari, all my Reading List websites were there, preserved from the Mavericks Safari. I certainly didn't expect that! A few other of my personal settings in various parts of the OS were also carried over. That being so, it strikes me that if any such preserved files were corrupt in the first place, then doing a Reinstall, whether locally or over the Web, won't necessarily give you a totally clean, new version of the OS, because it may well have copied across from the Recovery partition the files that were faulty. As the user, you unfortunately have no control over what's preserved and what isn't. I might add though that the problem in hand - that of sound alerts not functioining in Mail - didn't exist in Mavericks, the OS I was replacing.

I need to tell you also that it took me three solid days of work to do the upgrade, reorganise my various disks and all my saved personal files, and masses of reconfiguring, so it's going to now take something real special for me to risk either a straightforward Reinstall, or a Reinstall over the Internet again.

Si,

Perhaps the question we should instead be asking everyone who visits these forums and this particular topic is not 'Do you experience the same problem?' but instead its converse 'Under Sierra, do you run POP e-mail in Mail and, if you do, do you have fully-functioning sound alerts in it, as per the 'New messages sound' setting and the 'Play sounds for other mail actions' setting?'

If we can find at least one person with an affirmative answer to the latter, then at least we'd know that Sierra is basically okay in this regard and that therefore it must be some aspect of our own OS updates that's at fault instead.

In going from Mavericks to Sierra, my iMac automatically restarted around 5 or 6 six times! Recovery in fact warned that it might. Each time, a progress bar showed various transfers between software. Following download of Sierra (all automatic, once started), the process didn't finish to the Desktop until all these swaps and new additions had subsequently completed, which took maybe a further 30 or 40 mins. Therefore there was plenty of scope for errors to occur and for files to be lost. Perhaps there's a moral in there somewhere: don't leave an upgrade for too long; keep abreast of each one; there's then probably less likelihood for OS files to go missing.

Of course, it's easier said than done to keep abreast. My issue since Mavericks has been that I've had to wait literally years for other manufacturers to catch up with the necessary revised compatibility of their apps or for new, revised device drivers. By going finally to Sierra, I've already had to forfeit one major app I was using, and I've had to make compromises in certain other areas too.

Si,

You raise some interesting points. Yes, I agree with what you say in your fourth paragraph concerning someone else's upgrade path. I hadn't thought of that one, so full marks for spotting a flaw in my logic there.

A few hours ago I made a minor advancement; not in the sounds issue but in Notifications. Before, I'd found that if I set Do Not Disturb to operate within the period 00:00 hr - 23.59 hr, ie. virtually all the time (which is what I want and need), these times were not retained when I exited from Notifications. They went straight back to what appeared to be the default period of 00:00 hr - 07:00 hr.

Quite by chance, I found a few hours ago that if I instead set the period to be 00:00 hr - 06:00 hr or, say, 08:00 hr, the times were retained. This was with NIGHT SHIFT and DO NOT DISTURB both set to ON. So I reckon that whoever redesigned Notifications from its Mavericks version changed it so that you could no longer set an all-around-24 hrs period. Instead, to cover the post-midnight period, NIGHT SHIFT was added. Get me?

I'm quite intrigued by you reporting that you yourself do still get the Sent 'whoosh', but that the Inbox alert sound comes and goes intermittently. That suggests that sounds in Sierra's Mail definitely hasn't been completely designed out.

Something else I myself have come to realise about Sierra is that, unlike with Mavericks (and possibly its successors), many within-screen functions that relate to signing into and out of various features and accounts either work very intermittently or not at all, and that, instead, you have to use an equivalent command within the app's menu bar. For example, I found this to be the case for signing out of the Apps Store. Another example would be Get Mail, in the Mail app (the icon version of Get Mail seeming not to actually work). So, I reckon that, amongst other changes, what the developer did with Sierra was to cut down the effective duplication of these functions, putting them instead (and only) into one of the menu bar's sub-menus. Trouble is, Apple's never told any of us users about these changes. IMHO, Apple should be required to publish a detailed list of all changes made to OSX whenever they introduce a new version, so that we can all study it and gauge whether we find the changes acceptable, or indeed even workable. At present, you, me and everyone else seem stuck with having to rely on a mere smattering of Apple marketing speak when we consider whether to upgrade or not, and the result is that we subsequently spend a great deal of time discovering for ourselves why and how various things no longer work in the way they did before. Goodness knows who beta-tests the new versions; quite clearly, with Sierra it wasn't done with much rigour.

I finally got to bed at 3.30am 'last night' (you and I may live in different global timezones), after spending several more hours looking for clues not only to the sounds issue but also some of the other bugs in my Sierra. No OS should ever require such time and effort to get it going. Notwithstanding some of the immense complexities for developers to deal with in personalised computers, this really isn't good enough and has seriously marred my view of Apple as regards its mainstream OSs.

You mention an Archive utility (as though it's some sort of separate utility within Sierra). There's no such utility of that name in mine.

Re Contacts, mine seems to be fine. I exported as a single file all of mine (on to an external disk), and then imported them back into Sierra.

I think it's clear that people who've moved to Sierra experience all kinds of different problems with it. This sound issue of mine is only one of quite a long list of significant problems and limitations of Sierra that I'm experiencing and which appear to be unresolvable. I suppose we can always wait and hope that Apple comes up with some sort of update to Sierra that placates everything, but with Apple always being in a manic rush to get the next new OS out of the door, we'll be waiting for a very long time.

This is my list of well-explored but unresolved issues with Sierra:-

1. The Mac's Sleep function works very intermittently. Often, if I click Apple icon > Sleep, the machine's screen will properly blank and enter Sleep mode, but then an instant later will emerge out Sleep. All power settings for my disks are correct. I've experimented with my mouse settings to see if they're a factor but with no result. Sometimes it'll take me 2 or 3 attempts before the machine stays in Sleep. In Mavericks, there was never any problem with this.

2. In Safari, cookies/cache additions do not get blocked, even when you configure for that (Privacy tab). I can't understand, anyway, the options offered; they all seem impractical and basically all the same.

3. One important account I run can randomly open without any intervention at all from me. (I'm not describing it for obvious security reasons).

4. Sound effects in Mail simply fail to work at all.

5. A driver for one of my older printers is no longer offered. Indeed, the list of printer drivers from all manufacturers is now very small compared to those in Mavericks.

6. Disk assignment in Time Machine doesn't fully work. (I do understand how to properly select the requisite disk). The icon on my Desktop won't turn green unless I double-click and open the TM folder. Doing a machine restart invariably leaves the TM disk deselected. Also, the 'make changes' security lock completely disappears and the only way I can then get it back is to perform a First Aid in Disk Utility on the TM disk.

7. Haven't asked others yet, but there are no solid colour options for the menu bar and menus generally. Basically, I'm saddled with a permanent translucent setup that looks ugly and which often makes text difficult to see.

8. The one 3rd party app I've installed is a screen calibrator from XRite. This is used with a USB-connected colorimeter. XRite's app worked fine in Mavericks and XRite's new version for Sierra was duly installed last night. Thus far, the app won't even recognise the colorimeter, so the app's completely unusable. I've e-mailed XRite and am awaiting their response.

I think you'll agree this is not a good school report. Indeed, at this juncture I'm seriously contemplating whether to try doing a Restore From a TM Backup. This will, however, be quite tricky because I renamed my various disk volumes, including the TM volume. Restoring the entire volume's contents from TM is not to be undertaken lightly because it involves wiping the boot disk. If the restore then fails you're left with nothing, and possibly then the only recourse available is to perform an Internet Recovery. But for an Internet Recovery, I think the Apple server will offer only Sierra, not Mavericks.

tygb,

Not sure what you mean by "make sure on the keyboard F12 button is on the higher side". Although I'm using a UK full Apple keyboard and the majority of my F keys (F1 to F12) are on the main part of the keyboard, along the top, there can sometimes be some minor differences between american and UK keyboards. I don't know whether the assignments for F keys are different, though.

Anyway, I tried your above settings and I also found again the two big switches for Night Shift and Do Not Disturb, and with them made sure that Do Not Disturb was set to Off. When I then opened Mail and sent a dummy message to myself (the method I've been using throughout), low and behold the Sent 'whoosh' was heard! However, on subsequent receipt of the message there was, as before, nothing; I received the message but there was no audible Inbox alert sounded. And now what's annoying is that the big switches, Night Shift and Do Not Disturb, have totally disappeared.

This is a significant piece of progress, but sound in Mail still isn't performing as it should, as the alert for incoming mail doesn't happen.

In the context of Mail and of Notifications, I don't pretend to know the significance of the F10, F11, and F12 keys. The symbols on those keys, on my keyboard, are a solid speaker (F10), a speaker with one level of output (F11), and a speaker with 3 levels of output (F12).