Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
•
Stick with default settings.
As previously discussed, Gmail works best with
Mavericks Mail when you leave everything at its default—such as not hiding the
All Mail label, as was once a good idea.
•
Be patient on your initial sync.
The first time you set up your Gmail account
in Mail, it must download all your messages, and if you have several gigabytes
worth of saved Gmail, that process might go on for
days
. During that time, Mail
might be sluggish, new messages may not appear promptly, and mailboxes may
appear to be empty even though they contain lots of messages when viewed on
the Gmail Web site.
There's nothing you can do here but wait—but once that initial synchronization
is done, things will go much faster. (You can keep track of Mail's progress by
choosing Window > Activity.)
•
Limit concurrent logins.
Gmail permits 15 simultaneous IMAP connections
for each account. That sounds like a lot, but a single copy of Mail uses up several
of those at once (in an effort to be more efficient). If you log in to the same
Gmail account on a couple of computers and a couple of iOS devices, you can
quickly chew up all of those allowed connections, after which one or more of your
devices will stop connecting and start giving you error messages. So, try to re-
duce the number of devices logged in to your Gmail account at once—especially
Macs running Mail.
•
Do the two-step.
If you've enabled Google's optional
Two-Step Verification
for
extra security when logging in to Gmail (an excellent idea, by the way), simply
entering your normal Gmail password when setting up Mail isn't sufficient; you
must generate a special one-time password and enter that.
To learn more about the process generally, read Lex Friedman's Macworld art-
icle
How to configure Google's two-step authentication
;
for detailed instructions
from Google about configuring Apple Mail to use two-step authentication, read
•
If all else fails, start over.
If your Gmail account is acting wonky in
Mail—especially if you've just upgraded to Mavericks from an older version of
Mac OS X—it often helps to delete your Gmail account (in System Preferences >
Internet Accounts) and then add it back from scratch.
It'll take a while for your messages to download again, but this process does wipe
out a number of odd gremlins. (You shouldn't lose any messages during this pro-
cess: Any mail still in Gmail will be re-downloaded, and if you've filed any Gmail
messages into local mailboxes, those messages will be untouched.)
