
How Mavericks ruined Apple Mail for Gmail users - rosser
http://www.tuaw.com/2013/10/23/how-mavericks-ruined-apple-mail-for-gmail-users/
======
aroman
I highly, HIGHLY recommend Airmail[0] as basically the best gmail, perhaps
general email client for Mavericks.

It is incredibly actively developed (betas are free, stable on MAS), immensely
feature rich, has out of the box excellent gmail-specific integration, and
even great Mavericks support including in-line notification bubble replying as
of today.

I have no affiliation with the app at all, but I too was incredibly dismayed
by how awful Gmail + Mail.app works these days.

[0]: [http://airmailapp.com](http://airmailapp.com)

~~~
techscruggs
Agreed. Airmail is my favorite email client too. Just to set expectations, it
does crash daily on me. That being said, it is still the best option out
there.

~~~
MartinCron
It's a sad state of affairs when the best option is one that crashes daily.

~~~
Lazare
I've been using it for many months, heavily, and I think it's crashed
once...and that was while using one of the beta builds.

Experiences clearly vary. :)

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3JPLW
The only problematic part for me has been that the setting "Store draft
messages on the server" reverted back to being on. When enabled, it ends up
generating hundreds of autosave messages and repeatedly trashing them.

But Mail.app seems to be working exactly as it used to otherwise. I use an
IMAP connection to Gmail, with a full local archive and over 54k messages.
Maybe I just haven't run into the problems yet? I don't use smart mailboxes;
perhaps that's where all the trouble is.

~~~
itafroma
I've been using Mail.app with Gmail since DP1 with four separate accounts and
your experiences are exactly the same as mine: business as usual except for
the hundreds of draft messages being generated due to "Store draft messages on
the server" being re-checked.

I do, however, use smart mailboxes: they have no effect on the functioning of
Gmail. They shouldn't, either: they're not much more than local saved
searches.

I suspect this might be a case of correlation rather than causation.

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w4
This is really problematic, since I been using Gmail + Apple Mail for
basically...ever. I guess it's time to stop putting off moving to a more full
featured client.

Speaking of which, any recommendations for clients that feature a Mailbox-
esque "remind" or "save for later" option? It looks like, of those linked in
the story, only Mail Pilot offers one. However, their desktop client isn't yet
available. Stock web-based Gmail is no good, since I have a ton of different
addresses I use on the regular (no, they can't be unified, they're for
different organizations), and the logging in/out is a huge pain. Plus I
desperately need notifications, or I'll be even less organized with email than
I already am.

~~~
jinushaun
The most full featured Gmail client is the website.

~~~
w4
Right -- but, like I said, I use multiple accounts that can't be unified into
one account, and the logging in/out to access them is a mess.

~~~
elithrar
[http://mailplaneapp.com/index.html](http://mailplaneapp.com/index.html) \-
multiple accounts are a breeze.

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stock_toaster
I was having this exact issue. While fiddling with something else, I happened
to have mail.app open on one of those empty smart folders in the background,
and did this from the terminal:

    
    
        sudo mdutil -i on /
    

Now mind you, it was _already_ enabled. I had previously tried forcing reindex
(-E) but that did nothing. No clue why setting 'enable' _again_ made any kind
of difference, but suddenly my smart folders sprang to life. I will keep an
eye on it, and see if it keeps working properly.

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cmiller1
I'm having no problems with Gmail on Apple's Mail on Mavericks... perhaps I'm
just not a big enough e-mail user? I only have about 10000 messages on that
account.

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Shivetya
I am not experiencing this issue. However I did get whacked when upgrading my
iPhone which then decided to use GMails unread count to determine what I had
not read. That was very frustrating, I went from a dozen or so unread on my
phone to thousands. The easy solution was to flag it all read at Gmail and my
phone calmed down.

I am going to assume that is why I am not being hit with this issue he
mentions. Both my mail accounts on my iMac are just fine. Still never
understood Apple's fascination with requiring three keys just to mark a
message as read.

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derefr
Here's an interesting question to me: has anyone, instead of switching away
from Mail.app to use Gmail, tried switching to purely using an Apple (iCloud)
mail account to get Apple's "intended" Mail.app experience? How is it,
relative to, say, the Gmail-launched-from-the-Chrome-app-launcher experience?

~~~
YooLi
You don't need to use iCloud mail to get Apple's "intended" experience. You
can use any email that follows the IMAP standard. Fastmail, Hotmail, Yahoo,
etc. Gmail has a custom, non-standard IMAP implementation.

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northernmonkey
Works well with Gmail for me. I suspect there is more to the problem than a
simple broad incompatibility.

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philwelch
There's always the option of switching to Fastmail. If you're using Apple Mail
instead of Gmail's web client, as I was, it was because Apple Mail caught up
by growing an "archive" button and Gmail regressed. This made Gmail the more
replaceable part, to me.

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dgulino
Reduce high cpu utilization from Mail: Spotlight -> Disable Mail & Messages
[http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/290194-apple-mail-
hig...](http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/290194-apple-mail-high-cpu-
usage/)

~~~
jlarocco
Not having email indexed for searching isn't a good solution, IMO.

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shocks
Apart from Thunderbird and mutt - what good email clients are around for OSX
that support PGP?

~~~
chipotle_coyote
Postbox lists a plugin for "Enigmail," described as "Send and receive signed
and encrypted messages using OpenPGP provided by GnuPG."

I (obviously!) don't use Enigmail, but I've been a happy Postbox user for
years. It also works fairly easily with S/MIME, which is what I've used for
signing and encryption in the past.

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ROFISH
Actually, I had an issue with Mail when I first started.

In years past, after an OS X upgrade, Mail.app would show a "Upgrade Mail"
prompt before using. Now it appears that instead, it's happily showing a blank
set of emails while it slowly (5 minutes-ish for me) converts to the new
version.

This is, of course, confusing to the user because it doesn't show ANY
indication that it's converting to a new version.

So likely, it's still converting the emails. That's why CPU spikes when you
first load too; it's not Spotlight but the conversion process (and Spotlight
is reading them while converting).

~~~
X-Istence
Actually the new Mail upon first startup did say it was upgrading the mail
database and everything else associated with it ...

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pbreit
Do any of the mail clients implement Gmail's new Promos/Updates tabs? I'm
looking for a happier medium between hiding those messages yet them still
being quite accessible.

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ratsbane
Has something changed with gmail imap recently? I use Apple Mail every few
days mostly just to keep a backup of my several gmail accounts. After reading
this I remembered I hadn't done this in a few days so I opened Apple Mail on
my Macbook (not upgraded to Mavericks yet) and got password prompts for each
account. None of the passwords I entered was accepted. I can log in through
the web just fine.

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hnriot
What a non-issue. If "you're a huge Gmail user on the Mac" then just use the
web interface. The only place where the web interface isn't the prime way to
interact with gmail is on the phone and google have an app for that.

If you really must use a thick client to use gmail, Thunderbird installs and
runs just fine on the mac.

~~~
3JPLW
Replace "huge Gmail user" with "huge email user that happens to use Gmail
servers as the host" and you can begin to see the trouble. _It shouldn 't
matter which IMAP client you use._ If there's trouble in communication between
Mail.app and Gmail's IMAP servers, then one of the two parties messed up. If
there's a regression in Apple's Mail.app, it is a big deal if you have an
established workflow with any piece of software. Likewise if Google is making
it harder to use your IMAP client of choice, it's a big deal. Users have
established patterns and they're hard to break. Hell, just re-syncing my whole
email archive into another client would take days (Google throttles batch
downloads aggressively, and I don't always have internet connectivity when I
need access to my email archive). Nevermind learning a new user interface.

When software regresses, users will complain.

~~~
hnriot
I still don't see the trouble. I use imap for work email, because our
corporate web mail looks like yahoo circa 2004, but gmail I use chrome, a far
better user experience.

~~~
meric
With Gmail, you're limited to seeing mail from one account at a time. With
Mail, it coalesces email from all my accounts into one list.

~~~
hnriot
not at all. gmail can pull from many imap or pop sources.

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matthewmacleod
I don't get it - what's the actual complaint? In my experience, Mail works
fine with Gmail - multiple accounts and quite a bit of volume. The web
interface seriously pisses me off.

~~~
dmlorenzetti
This article talks about the problem(s) in greater detail:
[http://tidbits.com/article/14219](http://tidbits.com/article/14219)

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egypturnash
I've been using GMail with Mail for a while. Works fine for me. Upgrading to
Mavericks changed absolutely nothing.

