Update (15-dec-14)
Forget all and everything about Mavericks. Upgrade to Yosemite and see all of your problems vanish in thin air :-)
Symptoms
- Inbox does not show new items even after hours and days
- All Mails and other folders do show new items
- Symptoms persist even after removing and recreating GMail account within Apple Mail or System Preferences/Internet Accounts
How to work-around
Disclaimer: This is what worked for me on OS X 10.9.5 after having fiddled around for days to no avail, including fixing an SMTP password most probably lost when migrating from my old Mac (within Apple Mail, use Window, Connection Doctor to investigate those kinds of problems).
- Using your Internet browser, open GMail
- Open Settings:
![Open Settings]()
Open Settings
- Select the Inbox tab
- For Inbox unread count choose Unread items in the inbox:
![Choose unread items in the inbox]()
Choose unread items in the inbox
- Don’t forget to click Save Changes.
- Within a couple of minutes your Apple Mail should start fetching GMail inbox items all of its own, eventually showing new mails the very instant they arrive.
Likely cause – if it works for you, why does this fix work?
- With Apple Mail, GMail uses the IMAP protocol to access all your mailbox data (inbox and all labels enabled for being visible for IMAP mail clients).
- In order to show incoming mails the very moment they arrive, your email client will only fetch new or changed mails when some significant event occurs.
- Due to some faulty code (within either Google servers or the Apple GMail client), your email program does not see those changes, possibly due to mixing up some counters.
- Choosing Unread items in the inbox restores the capability of your email program to properly detect any new email items arriving within your inbox.
Notes
- In case you’ve just re-created your GMail internet account, it may take very long to download all mails to your Mac as Google is throttling the download pace to prevent excessive load on its servers.
- Power nap (i.e. fetching mails while sleeping) doesn’t work for me, possibly due to the fact I set my Keychain Access to require a password when waking up from sleep (numerous Access to item attempted while keychain is locked within Console messages).
