Gmail IMAP not working with Mac Mail? Google finally admits the issue.
I’ve held off on this news for a good week or two for a couple of reasons. If you recall, I’d written a series of posts explaining how my Mac Mail client went completely wonky with Gmail’s IMAP service. No rhyme or reason, it just started having a problem and when I let Mail run, it hosed up the mail delivery on my Outlook 2007, iPhone and Gmail web clients. Mail would come in minutes, hours or even days later. The Mac Mail client would constantly be in a state of synching, but no data was actually getting synched. All in all, just a general mess that killed my productivityThe issue has been resolved, but unfortunately I can’t tell you how. No, I’m not under NDA or anything, it’s just that Gmail’s support folks simply fixed the problem after three attempts and never told me what the resolution was. I had a great e-mail dialogue going with them the entire time. In fact, I wrote nearly 1,500 words in the e-mail trail since I was explaining to all of the observable issues and all of my testing on a client-by-client basis. The effort and persistence paid off because they put my account under maintenance three times for a total of around 18 hours and the third time was a charm. Even better: Google has recently admitted there is an issue causing this problem and that they’re working on it. I’ve seen many people report this issue both in the Gmail and Apple support forums, so while I don’t have the details, I think there’s good news on the way. And boy is it good to have e-mail flowing again!
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I’ve been having a lot of trouble with Gmail IMAP and a Treo. I don’t think this is a Mac problem, necessarily.
How in the world did you manage to make contact with Google’s support?! There’s actually an @google.com email address out there????
William, there could be issues with other clients as well. I had no issues in Outlook 2007 or on the web, but I did with my Mac and as I did, that impacted my other clients also.
MacIt, I dug around on the Google Gmail discussion forums until I found the link that puts you in touch with Gmail support. If I find it again, I’ll update the above post.
I had the same symptom. After much digging and trying thunderbird, i figured out the problem: captcha. Gmail asks the client to enter the captcha info. But thankfully, you can disable it: https://www.google.com/accounts/UnlockCaptcha?