You’ve probably reading this page because you too are experiencing issues with your Gmail + IMAP + Snow Leopard/Mail.app setup. At the time of this post there has been no official word from Apple or Google, but I’ll share with you what I’ve been able to determine myself.
Something in has changed in Snow Leopard that causes problems on some Gmail and Google Apps accounts. I’m not completely sure whats going on behind the scenes, but a problem has arisen where Gmail complains the “Account exceeded bandwidth limits.” This means that too much data has travelled between Mail.app on your Mac and Gmail, and Google automatically cuts your account off to maintain service for other users.
If you’ve already been blocked, don’t worry, you can still get your mail online. The block should be removed within a day. I also changed this setting that seems to have prevented me from getting blocked again. In the menubar, click Mail > Preferences > Accounts > select your account > Advanced and change the “Keep copies of messages for offline viewing” to “All messages, but omit attachments”.
Select "All messages, but omit attachments"
Please tell me if this solution works for you guys. I hope that either or Apple or Google comment on this issues because it does seem to be effecting a number of people.
I have been having this problem… I was locked out for 5 days, not 1. and when it started working again, it spent a very long time trying to download something…. probably all my attachments… so i’ve changed the setting as you have it here, and have to wait for the second lock (another 5 day sentence i guess) to expire…
Mine seems to be stuck trying to upload to Gmail. Even after I remove the account from mail then add it back my upload rate maxes out the DSL connection.
There seems to be no clear answer why Mail 4.1 is broken on Snow Leopard.
I have this same problem – snow leopard / iphone 3.1 = google apps
it seems to work in waves and then go away again!!
I have been having this same problem intermittently ever since I installed Snow Leopard, and it had affected both Apple Mail and my iPhone. I will get locked out for close to 12-18 hours. Then it will work again but every couple days or so I will be locked out again. I have made this change you pointed out… I’m currently locked out but we shall see if it fixes the problem permanently once the lock is lifted.
Thanks!
i just bought a macbook pro upgraded to snow leopard, mail 4.1, and there are no way to receive messages. i follow step by step all the instructions on gmail page. curiously, i can send messages.
Sending Messages: Should work on Snow Leopard because this problem only effects POP3 and IMAP (incoming) connectivity, and SMTP (outgoing) still works fine.
iPhone: I had this problem with my iPod touch. It turns out that Google locks out your entire account, rather than a specific computer or IP. I suppose this makes sense, but it means that your iPhone/iPod nor any other computers can access your account until the block is removed.
Remember you can still read your mail at http://gmail.com not a great solution, but hopefully once you change your settings everyone’s issues will go away like mine.
Brendan
i’ve got the same problem and tried the fix you mention above, to no avail. every morning my iphone can check email for about 2 hours and then it’s back to no email on the phone.
my mac book has been unable to check mail for 10 days now.
not really sure what to do. i’ve tried to read every forum i know about this issue and no one has put up any fixes that really work.
any other suggestions?
thanks,
matt
I just upgraded to Snow Leopard, and Mail is of course my most used application. Fortunately with 12 years of I.T. behind me I knew right away something wasn’t right when the Mail Activity window would “never stop” no matter how many times I cancelled the file transfer.
I applied the settings as recommended here (prior to being locked out fortunately!) and things seem to have subsided for now. Only mail activity. What appears to have been this vicious “loop” has been broken.
As long as I can get my attachments downloaded with the original mail I’m good
I never was blocked, but a message I was trying to send remained in the drafts folder. I tried your solution, then resend and all works fine. Thanks, Jim
https://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha
go there enter info and the secret picture word and it will reset the block on your account. So, you all can check Imap again…It did not fix the Receive problem for me but if your issue is Gmail locking you out that should unlock it.
When I connected to the gmail server through the auto mail setup assistant, it downloaded all messages from Aug 1 2009 to current, and I am not able to permenantly delete them now. They are not in the gmail inbox, but under the gmail mail icons on the side at the bottom. How do I get rid of these emails under ‘All Mail’? When I delete them, they come back later on.
Please help.
“All Mail” is a listing of all the messages on your Gmail account. You can’t edit anything in this folder, as they’re more like shortcuts to messages in all your other folders (Inbox, Sent, Junk, Trash etc)
Why do you want to delete the messages? My first suggestion would be to delete all messages in the Trash folder of your Gmail account, or login to Gmail in Safari and do it there.
Hi – Two days ago my apple mail (snow leopard) started having sending issues. It now takes forever to send a message (even one that only has “test” in the body / subject of the email) and then it stalls when it gets to synchronizing with the server. Ever since that happened, none of my incoming messages have downloaded to my computer mail inbox. That said, I don’t think I am blocked because my iphone mail is working fine and I can receive and send mail. Anyone know what is wrong or how to fix it?
Thanks.
Hi Karen,
If you’re using Gmail I have something you can try.
Login to your account at http://gmail.com and click on Settings in the top right. Now click on “Labs”, and look for “Advanced IMAP Controls”, select Enable and click Saves Changes at the top or bottom of the page. Now near the top of the page find Labels. Open that, and on this page look for the line that says “All Mail”. Unselect “Show in IMAP”.
After that try quitting and opening Mail again. It should work, tell me how it goes. =)
Brendan
Hi Brendan,
Thanks for your response. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be working for me.
Yesterday I updated to 6.2 and unlocked my Captcha. Neither worked. Today I enabled advanced IMAP controls and unselected All Mail in labels. No dice.
Gmail in my Apple Mail is still hanging on “Opening Mailbox”, “Performing Pending”, “Fetching New Mail”, “Synchronizing – Traversing mailbox” and “Communicating – Adding messages”.
Suggestions?
Karen
Something may have become corrupted in the mailbox, have you tried removing the account in Mail and setting it up again? That might clear up the issue.
No I haven’t tried that yet. Will that mean I will be importing all my mail all over again? That took ages last time…
Yes, it would.. The good news is that if you make the changes I outlined in my post, it won’t have to download all the attachments. Also, since you’ve disabled “All Mail” in IMAP you won’t be downloading duplicates of every message this time. That should save you a lot of time.
Best of luck, and tell me how it goes.
Hi Brendan,
So I removed the gmail account and then added it again. It seemed to only import some of my sent messages but other than it was fine for about 3 days. Then I sent an email with a large attachment of pictures which seemed to send fine. It copied into my sent messages offline folder and I continued to receive email for about 4 hours. Then it started hanging on syncronization AGAIN. Now I have that email trapped somewhere because it dozens of copies of it are popping up in my recovered messages folder. I keep deleting the messages and deleting the folder but they keep appearing. Now I have not downloaded any new mail since about 9:30pm EST last night.
Any suggestions beyond removing the account and adding it again? Is there any way to actually send large attachments will apple mail without this happening?
Karen
It is possible, sending/receiving large attachments is working on my machines. I think the biggest issue is getting the mailbox completely downloaded.
I have a few questions.. How many email messages do you have (eg: arround 2000, around 17,000)? Did you change the “all messages, but omit attachments” setting I talked about in the post? Also, could you click Window (in the menu bar), then Activity and tell me if it says anything in there?
As for the sent messages problem, I would suggest connecting the Sent folder to the Gmail server instead of storing them locally. In the left pane of Mail, look for the name of your Gmail account (near the bottom, mine is Gmail for example), find the Sent Messages folder and select it, then click Mailbox in the menu bar, click “Use this Mailbox For” and then Sent. Now all messages you’ve sent from Gmail should show up. Make sure you’ve changed the attachment setting, though, or it may try to download all the attachments you’ve sent.
Yes, I did change that setting to “all messages, but omit attachments” and I have about 4900 emails in my gmail inbox and 3980 in my sent mail (imap). Since I removed and then re-added the account, I only have 79 messages in my local sent mail. All that said, I believe that all of my gmail downloaded properly before this happened. The problem started after I sent an email with a large attachment which appears to send fine but gets stuck in the recovered messages folder. The same thing happened the first time.
The current activity is:
[Gmail] Sychronizing with – Updating offline disk cache – solid blue bar but hanging
Copying messages – Updating offline disk cache – empty bar and hanging
[Gmail] Sychronizing to – Copying message – empty bar and hanging
[Gmail] Fetching new mail – Fetching new mail – zebra bars
[Gmail] Communicating – Adding messages – zebra bars
[Sent mail - Gmail ] – Opening mailbox – zebra bars
Sent – Gmail] Opening – Opening mailbox – zebra bars
Any thoughts?
There shouldn’t be that many active processes after the initial import.. Something like the large message is blocking it up.
Open your account from Mail’s preferences, click Mailbox Behaviours and uncheck Drafts and Sent (Gmail will make its own copy of sent messages anyway). Then restart Mail and see what happens.
I had already disabled store draft messages on server so I disabled store sent messages on server and restarted mail and nothing. Still hanging.
Current activity:
[Gmail] Fetching new mail – copying message – empty bar
[Gmail] Sychronizing with – Traversing mailbox hierarchy – zebra bars
[Gmail] Communicating – adding messages – zebra bars
I suspect I have to remove and add the account again to fix this but I am unconvinced it won’t happen again since I had already disabled store drafts on server before I sent the email with the large attachment. Since it keeps popping up in recovered messages, I had assumed it got stuck somewhere before it was designated “sent” but it doesn’t make sense because it has been copied into my ‘sent messages” folder on the server.
Is anyone else having issues sending large attachments? It was about 18mgs. I work in media so I am always going to have to send large attachments… wondering if I am going to have to do that through the web browser only. Very frustrating.
Yep… I’ve got the same problem as Karen… SMTP works fine, so I can send e-mails, but I can’t get any e-mail by IMAP.
Macbook Pro, Snow Leopard, Gmail IMAP settings, nothing changed since setting up the account in Mail. All was well until a few days ago. Now messages won’t send. A window keeps popping up asking for the User/Pass. Would it be possible to change to the ISP SMTP or does the set up require the Gmail SMTP?
Thanks
hi guys,
well exactly the same issue and same behaviour comes up on zimbra 6.x in conjunction mail.app.
this is some kind of IMAP problem and it seems mail.app has a problem with the imap daemon which is used by zimbra and gmail.
actually i found out that this does not happen with thunderbird.
you should get rid of the attachement which causes the problem and cleanup the mail.app mailbox, but you need some unix experience for this.
because of imap, you could simply delete your mailaccount in mail.app and also delete everything in /Users//Library/Mail and setup it again – after that all your maildata will synced up again with gmail,…
cheers
Thanks for this post and all the comments. I had the same problem with an 1and1 account. Ended up removing the account from Mail and reinstalling it. Seems to have worked. For now. Thanks!
I was struggling with the same situation recently and tried all possible solutions available on other forums but nothing worked. I tried to find the cause of it on my own and this worked in my case:
Close mail.app and go to folder /Users/your_user_name/Library/Mail/IMAP-account_affected/
delete hidden folder ‘.OfflineCache’ and restart mail.app. Hopefully, someone will find it useful.
The above info from Robert was a great start, but also found the below info to be a great help…
I found the problem identified here (http://getsatisfaction.com/google/topics/getting_error_message_account_exceeded_bandwidth_limits) and then the solution to the recovered mail folder here (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=4395706bba19fb05&hl=en)
Good Luck!!
I’m having the problem with mail timing out before getting any new mail from gmail servers also. It will send, but not recieve. I deleted the account, set it again, and it worked until I did a manual sync – I also run an iphone and a mac laptop. Then it went down. The problem is this: when you use snow leopard mail on several computers or devices they send too much data when they try to get your mail or sync if they do it simultaneously and google thus locks you out, since their server is set to lock out any over activity on the account. Apparently mail uses several lines to connect to servers, so even two can overload it. That would explain why only some users experience it. And why it’s only related to snow leopard. Unless google or mail fix it, I’m using Thunderbird. Seems to me Mac is getting sloppier and sloppier all the time with their operating systems. Thunderbird lets you encrypt, too, I hear. If anyone comes up with a fix for this, that would be helpful, too.
I ran into the above mentioned problem also. But after doing what was in the origial post, and in JoezW’s post, the problem went away. Thank you everyone!