Anyone else with no sound in Mail?

Si et al,

Obviously, I've appreciated all your attempts to find a solution to this sounds issue, but by last night I was thoroughly fed up with trying all the suggestions. None of them made any sense on my Mac. At best, I was able on one or two occasions to get the Sent whoosh, but that's all; never any Inbox sound.

With there being so many other problems with my new Sierra, I finally gave in to my intuition and decided that today I'd rid my machine of Sierra and go back to Mavericks. So that's what I've now done. I performed a Reinstall of OSX Using Time Machine. Always risky of course, but I'm relieved to say it worked. So I'm now back with good old Mavericks, where these Mail sounds actually work.

By going back I've also rid myself of the multitude of other features in my new Sierra that didn't work properly. That said, there were one or two shortcomings in the Mavericks I'd left: (1). Finder's layout columns would always be pushed over to the far right, and a number of filesizes for disk volumes were wrongly reported, and (2). Some quite minor bugs in Safari (which might have been down to the website itself anyway). Two of the regrets I have is that I won't now be able to use TLS security in my e-mail account, as Mavericks doesn't support TLS, and I won't be able to update my edition of MS Office 2011 for Mac any further, as updates for that, under Mavericks, have now ceased.

Retrospectively, I've now looked in my Mavericks-version Notifications. There, I had 'Turn On Do Not Disturb: from 00:00 to 23:59'. Nothing else in that caption was selected. In the Mail part, though, Mail Alert Style was set to None and the only other option selected was 'Play sound for notifications'. When selecting Notifications in the menu bar, there was only a 'Do Not Disturb' big button. Underneath it, it said 'Will turn off at 23:59'. I had this big button set to On.

Why on earth, in more recent OSXs, Apple's messed around with this is beyond me. By integrating the Night Shift feature into it later on - Night Shift being a Display feature and therefore nothing to do with Mail or Sounds at all - they've obviously screwed it up. And why, as has now been alleged, link Mail sounds with keyboard buttons? Okay, the keyboard sound buttons, if set up in the right way, are a shortcut, but most people are quite capable of setting up Sound in System Preferences.

I concluded quite some time ago that, from Mavericks on, it's simply not possible to perform a truly clean reinstall of it, or of any other more recent version of OSX you care to put on the machine. Apple continues to provide OSX Utilities which include 'Reinstall OSX', 'Restore From a TM Backup', etc., and the Reinstall OSX option kinda suggests that you'll get a nice fresh copy of it. However, the reality is - or can be - quite different.

With a Mavericks machine, when you do a Reinstall OSX, two types of reinstall are on offer - either a 'full Internet Recovery' or simply 'Reinstall', depending on whether you used Cmd-Opt-R or just Cmd-R on the restart. But, on a Mavericks machine, both actually require Internet access, because the reinstalls both involve Recovery (the normally hidden and protected 700MB of software that's on the built-in HD) reinstating a certain amount of software itself and then getting the rest (the core OSX, you might say) from the requisite Apple server over the Internet. This also depends to some extent on the firmware within the Mac. So, it can be a quite complex business doing what some people still refer to as a 'clean reinstall'. Believe me, I researched this quite well a year or two ago (various different Apple articles that I downloaded and printed), prior to actually performing an Internet Recovery of Mavericks at that time (which was essentially successful).

Restoring from a TM Backup, one of the other options in OSX Utilities when you do a Cmd-R or Cmd-Opt-R, is a different kettle of fish, because a TM restore isn't necessarily for achieving a clean reinstall, it's meant for choosing and restoring the state of the OSX partition on a given date. This, BTW, is different to how TM works outside of OSX Utilities. When you run TM from a normal screen, you can only restore individual non-sytem files. Some people don't realise that there are two quite different modes in which TM can be operated.

Returning to the fact that I've now restored, using TM, to OSX Mavericks, I did, yesterday afternoon, subsequently hit a problem with Mail. Unknown to me at the time, my outgoing mail was going to the requisite smtp server unauthenticated, and yet all my Mail account settings were correct. As a result, OSX kept asking me for a password. But it then wouldn't react to what I gave it. It transpired that the mail server, as a result, put a block on my IP. After consulting my ISP, I finally cured the matter this morning by completely deleting the Mail account and then reconstructing it. Presumably, a system file associated with the account had become corrupted as a result of the restore. So far, everything else on my machine seems okay, though only time will tell. The moral of the story: system restores are by no means guaranteed to be 100% perfect.

Yeh, it looks like I'm saddled with Mavericks pretty much for good. The upgrade to Sierra proved absolutely disasterous. It seems that some people are luckier than others in such circumstances and much depends on the existing version of OSX and the precise type of upgrade you do - whether just straight over the top of the existing OS or instead erasing the boot disk and doing a supposed 'clean install'.

Yeh, that's what they all say. I did what I thought was a clean install, erasing (formatting) the target drive (in my case, the built-in hard drive), and so on, but it was as plain as the nose on my face that when it all finally dropped out to the new OS, the Recovery mechanism had pre-installed many of my settings. So no, I'm afraid you're wrong. What you contend might be the case in some limited instances but never in my experience with trying 'clean install'. There's lots of misinformation about this on the Web.

dialabrain and Si,

We're not talking about about booting from an external device here, we're talking about booting from the boot volume embedded in the Mac itself. On modern Macs there is always a Recovery partition on the HD, though it's especially hidden (to prevent idiots erasing it) and is only marginally visible when you use Disk Utility to do a format or partitioning. It's kept in a protected area of the drive. (I've a feeling that a Recovery partition also gets copied across to a bootable external device, but that's another story). It's that Recovery partition and its contents on the Mac which determine how and what can and needs to be installed on to that particular Mac. Part of Recovery's function is also to run a skeleton machine so that the very download of the new OS can happen - when you do a supposed clean install, remember: you erase the HD's contents! But it doesn't erase the whole lot, because without that Recovery partition you simply wouldn't be able to ever do a Recovery of OSX over the Internet. In fact, when you start a Recovery Over The Internet process, the first thing that happens is that a check is done on the Recovery partition in the background. If its contents are found to be okay, the connection with the Apple server (not the Apps Store) proceeds and eventually the new supposedly clean OSX is downloaded and automatically installed. If the contents aren't okay, then what gets installed with the new OS is also a new copy of Recovery.

Until relatively recently, I was under the impression that a full Internet Recovery Over The Internet was what I and many others supposed was a clean install but in fact I came across an Apple article that said that, irrespective of whether you perform a straight Reinstall or an Internet Recovery install, Recovery will always ensure that your main settings are retained and then automatically inserted into the OS, once downloaded. That seems to have been borne out by what I myself found a few days ago.

Recovery is built into the Mac to ensure that there's always a get-out if something disasterous happens to the OS on the HD. Recovering OSX, whether clean or otherwise, doesn't require that each Mac be sold with an external bootable drive.

At the moment I'm trying to find in all my mass of Internet printouts the various Apple articles that explain all of this much better than I can. When I do I'll post their links here for you all to use.

dialabrain,

First of all, apologies for my recent delay in responding. I'm afraid I've had to catch up on other things.

Internet recovery is in the EFI Firmware.

I think you may well be right about that. Indeed, I was planning to suggest myself that that was the case. I think it may well be held in PRAM. It is, however, referred to by Apple as a Recovery Partition and effectively becomes an add-on to the boot partition on the Mac. It holds the software responsible for OSX Utilities in the situation where you're running some sort of recovery. I believe it also must hold the software necessary to run a skeleton Network service so that you can access the requisite Apple server. It appears to also retain some of the user's browser and e-mail contents. For example, not only were my Reading List websites automatically reinstated when Sierra finally booted up but also all my Mail inboxes and their contents were restored without my intervention. Even though I'd done a complete erasure of the internal disk prior to the reinstall, all those settings were saved in the background and then restored.

Just to press home the point, my method was:

1. Using the OSX Utilities reached by Cmd-Opt-R and then first of all choosing Disk Utility, I erased the entire internal disk. I made well sure of the erasure by writing a 1-pass of zeros over the complete disk. Having done that, I then repartitioned to three partitions, of which one was reserved for the OS (I'd previously run with three partitions). These were all to Mac OS Extended Journaled (GUID table), of course. So the very process of creating those partitions would alone have completely wiped them, let alone what I did by way of a 'security wipe'.

2. I then did a Reinstall from The Internet (Internet Recovery). This I expected to be of Mavericks - but a clean install (it clearly wasn't a clean install).

3. On completion of that, and from within Mavericks, I proceeded to an upgrade to Sierra, by going to the Apps Store and my personal account.

So, what was wrong with that? And BTW, although I wasn't allowed to make a copy of the Mavericks dmg installer before it executed, I was allowed to do that with the Sierra upgrade file, so I still have that copy reasonably well to hand.

I can see that if instead you download Sierra from the Apps Store and then install it on an external disk (drive) and you make that drive bootable, you can then swop between your existing OS (in my case, Mavericks) and Sierra. So in that regard having the new OS on an external disk will help in assessing its worth, because you can then more easily revert to the original OS if necessary. However, the business of needing to do a hack in Terminal to make the external disk bootable in the first place puts a lot of people off. I preferred to do it my way, using TM to go back to Mavericks if things didn't work out - which they didn't; there were too many bugs found in Sierra. I didn't have a spare external drive anyway.

One thing you have to be very careful of when just downloading the file from the Apps Store and sticking it on an external drive is whether that downloaded file is actually a new, clean version of Sierra, rather than just the bits required to change it from its former OS, ie. whether it's perhaps just Mavericks with Sierra loaded over the top. At the Apps Store, the Sierra that was available to me from the outset was described as an upgrade, and so I installed it as such. Incidentally, because I've downloaded it (as such) and have made a copy of it, the Apps Store still labels it as 'Installed' (presumably, because despite me having reverted to Mavericks, it's found the copied Sierra dmg file somewhere in one of my other partitions?).