The Ballad of Mobile, and Me
Note: if you want the fix, skip right on down to the bottom.
Back in July when the iPhone 3G launched, one of the services that I was most excited about was the new and improved MobileMe, specifically the Push email. I use a Blackberry for work, and appreciated the speed and immediacy that Push email provided (and it was also a highly touted new feature)
The problems that MobileMe encountered on launch were fairly severe (and dissected ad nauseam around the web). Personally, I had two issues, both related to email, that I wanted working smoothly as quickly as possible.
First, I wanted to continue using my Gmail address, but route it through MobileMe to get the Push capability. I thought this would be fairly simple, but as it turned out, it wasn’t. The MobileMe service doesn’t have the ability to “send mail as” as a lot of other services do. Eventually, by playing around with the incoming and outgoing mail servers, and sending a heck of a lot of test emails to myself, I was able to get it to work (hit me up if you’re looking for specifics of what I did).
Second was getting reliable Push email on both my desktop machine (using Mail) and the iPhone. The Push email on the phone worked well and consistently soon after the initial launch complications were corrected. Getting it to work in Mail on the desktop was another story.
I knew that Mail, and my desktop machine, were capable of receiving Push email because I tested it numerous times. I have a work PC that sits on the other side of my desk, and I would send myself a test message, turn and look at Mail and watch it show up almost instantly in the inbox and see the unread message counter change in the Dock. Here’s the kicker though—this only worked when Mail was the active application.
When Mail was hidden, which was almost all the time, I wouldn’t be notified of new mail until I switched to the Mail app. It would then pause a few seconds and I would see the messages download and show up. This was enormously frustrating for a couple of reasons.
One is that I have another email account that runs in Mail as well. This is just an old POP account that I use for mailing lists, etc. It’s set to check for mail every five minutes. This account continued to work properly in the background all the time. It would check the account, and change the Dock unread count as needed. However, this count would be inaccurate as it didn’t reflect all accounts. For a while I thought that maybe this account’s scheduled check would trigger the MobileMe mail to download as well, but no go there. The second reason is that my iPhone sits next to me on my desk 99% of the time. The Push works fine there, and I would get the audible new mail tone when something came in. This meant that I would be sitting working, and I’d hear a new mail alert from the phone, but a quick glance at the count in the Dock would be totally inaccurate. Sometimes I’d open Mail and one message would come in, sometimes it would be five, etc. This may not be a big deal to most people, but it annoyed the shit out of me.
This went on for months. I poked around the internet trying to find an answer, talked to some folks that have seen the same issue, but I’d never been able to fix it. It just became one of those little nagging things that I filed away and hoped would just fix itself with an update eventually.
Enter 10.5.6
When 10.5.6 got arrived, I updated immediately, and was very pleased to see that all of the sudden I was now getting almost simultaneous Push email on both the desktop and iPhone. Oh happy day. (I remembered that I posted on Twitter about it working, and now when I go to check, I see that it’s a nice little abbreviated version of these ongoing issues).
Everything worked well for a few days, and then all of the sudden the other bane of my OS X existence, Time Machine, locked my machine up and required a hard restart. When I got started back up—poof—no more Push in Mail. It was right back to only working when Mail was the active app. Oh unhappy day.
It turns out that this somehow corrupted my Bookmarks file as well, and I started getting MobileMe sync errors. I decided to try MobileMe chat support. While I was chatting with the support rep there, I asked about the Mail problem, and he said he’d transfer me to a Mail specialist when the Bookmarks issue was fixed (side note—this was my first time dealing with MobileMe chat support, and they couldn’t have been more friendly or patient. Very impressive.)
After getting transferred to a Mail specialist, I recapped the issue I was having. After a few minutes he asked:
Have you tried to reset the account in the Mail app by deleting it and adding it back?
Nope. Hadn’t tried this. I’d asked around, read support forums, and thrown my hands up in the air, but I’d never tried this simple fix. Guess what, it worked. Mail quickly re-built all my IMAP folders, and as soon as I tested it out I was back in business. Full of Pushy goodness. I asked the support rep if he’d seen this a lot, and he said no, but that it was likely just a small corruption that was fixed by deleting and re-doing the account.
At this point, I’ll never know for sure, but I suspect that this fix would have worked months ago if I had thought to ask the right question or try the simple fix. I know 10.5.6 made some improvements to Mail, so something may have changed (I’m not technically savvy enough under the hood to really know), but this 90 second solution could have been sitting here for the taking the whole time.
THE BOTTOM LINE
If you’re having issues with MobileMe mail not pushing properly into the Mail app, delete the account from Mail, and re-add it. Should fix the problem!
