New Email Not Showing Up in OS X Mail App? Here Are 2 Workarounds osxdailynews.blogspot.com

osxdailynews.blogspot.com ® New Email Not Showing Up in OS X Mail App? Here Are 2 Workarounds

The bundled Mail app for Mac has taken an odd turn since the release of OS X Mavericks, gaining a collection of odd bugs and incompatibilities with a variety of email providers. Apple has released several updates aiming to resolve the difficulties (particularly with Gmail), but many users continue to report issues with the once reliable Mail app on their Macs, and one of the more frustrating lingering issues is that new emails don’t consistently show up in Mail app for certain providers.

This appears to be a connection issue limited to how the Mac Mail app interacts with specific email providers, which is why it’s not impacting every user. Thus, the two workarounds are basically two ways to forcibly reestablish connections between the OS X Mail application and the remote email server. Only users who have been effected by new mail not showing up reliably should need to bother with this, and if you haven’t noticed any issues so far then you’re probably not impacted.

Workaround 1: Quit & Relaunch Mail App

The easiest solution for many has been to simply relaunch Mail app every time users want to check their mail with the trouble providers.

Yes, that means quitting the app and reopening it again to check your email. The quickest way to do that is just hit Command+Q from the Mail app, and open it again from the Dock. This does work to reestablish a connection to the remote mail servers, but it’s a tad clunky to say the least.

Workaround 2: Take the Email Accounts Offline

If quitting and relaunching Mail isn’t reasonable, Apple has offered their own workaround to deal with the new mail issue until a future update comes out to fix the problem: taking the troubled account offline, then bringing it back online, thus forcibly reestablishing a connection between Mail app and the remote email server. Here’s how to do that:

1. From Mail app, pull down the “Mailbox” menu and choose “Take All Accounts Offline”
   

   

   
   


2. Go back to the “Mailbox” menu and now choose “Get All New Mail”
   

   

   
   

This forces a connection to be made between the Mac Mail app and the remote mail server, thereby downloading new emails and updating the inbox as expected.

Personally I don’t find taking an email account offline then back online to be any faster than just quitting and relaunching the entire application, but for some users this may be a better interim solution.

There have been mixed reports of resolving email difficulties by deleting and re-adding mail accounts, and sometimes simply rebuilding the mailbox is enough to resolve inbox troubles, but these are all workarounds that shouldn’t be necessary with a proper bug release from Apple. Whether or not a resolution arrives as a separate update or as part of a wider OS X Mavericks update remains to be seen.

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