[ph0ust]

hi all. this has been happening for some time now, but mail.app only periodically grabs emails from my imap accounts. what i mean is that if i launch mail.app it grabs everything on the server (for my imap accounts) and all is synced. however, after some period of time, it simply stops syncing properly. sometimes it will grab a few emails, sometimes none until i quit the app and relaunch it, at which point it completely syncs again.

anyone else seen this or heard of such an issue? am i alone here on this one? thanks.

[besson3c]

Do you have Mail set to automatically check for new messages?

[ph0ust]

yea, every minute. tried changing it to every 5 minutes to see if that makes a difference. will have more data on that in a few days i guess.

[Big Mac]

Yeah, I have the same problem with my .Mac IMAP account, ph0ust. The funny thing is, though, I have always had that problem with Mail on that account. I don't know if it's a general IMAP thing - I don't think it could be because otherwise many more people would have mentioned it. But the fact remains that I cannot get Mail to reliably check .Mac for new mail. I have to manually click Get Mail to be certain I'm not missing mail.

[ph0ust]

well at least clicking get mail works for you... it doesn't do anything in my case. the only thing that works is if i quit and re-launch the app. pop accounts work just fine... only my imap is screwed.

[Big Mac]

That sux the big one. Have you verified that it isn't some sort of server-client incompatibility issue? What mail server are you using?

[besson3c]

Have you checked your console.log or system.log within your Console utility?

[ph0ust]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

That sux the big one. Have you verified that it isn't some sort of server-client incompatibility issue? What mail server are you using?

that shouldn't be an issue given use of a protocol (imap), but it is a linux hosted solution.

Have you checked your console.log or system.log within your Console utility?

interesting. while i am not super savvy with reading a *nix log, it seems that a lot is happening. damn harmony remote seems to phone home every few minutes even though the software is NOT running. looks like i need to install little snitch. seems there are lots of "dashboardclient [5428] ip change" logs, although my ip is NOT changing. when i go to the mail.app log in /var/log, it has an entry for every day saying the the mail system is down -- accessing queue directly. not sure why, but it has that once for every day.

mind you i have to quit and reload my mail client (on both my macs) maybe 10-20 times a day to ensure i am getting my mail.

[besson3c]

The next time Mail is having problems accessing your mail, try this...

If authentication to your IMAP server only works over SSL (which is hopefully the case), try this in your terminal:

telnet <yourservername> 993

If you aren't using SSL, try this (and contact your ISP about using SSL, because you should be):

telnet <yourservername> 143

If you get a response, you know that the server is indeed responding on this port.


If you get a response this way, this is probably a client side issue. Chances are Mail might have corrupted one of its configurations or something. Try this from another user account on the same machine. If there are no problems there, you should be able to delete Mail's pref files, recreate them, and you should be fine.

[haydenr]

Hi did anyone find a solution to this? I have exactly the same problem.. and I have been searching for a very long time for a fix. Thanks for any info!!

[ph0ust]

nope, still does the same thing. i tried a few things, none of which worked. perhaps not enough people use imap email for this to become a more widespread issue?!?!?! regardless, it kinda sucks. i hate quitting/restarting mail all day long.