I never download anything in Safari this slow. It’s easily hundreds of times faster. It’s been well over a month since I setup my GMail IMAP. I’ve done some initial investigation, but nothing concrete showed up that I hadn’t tried. Any ideas?
GMail IMAP in Mail.app Slow?
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December 30th, 2007 at 19:04
Hi Tim, I’m having the same issue with Leopard Mail. I set up IMAP to download my Gmail, which it’s done, however it’s usually a few days behind ! Today on 31 Dec the last mail that Leopard Mail can see is one on the 29th December, and that’s leaving the computer on overnight. I even tried “rebuilding” the mailbox too.
I’m wondering if it’s to do with the size of my Gmail mail file - 2,361MB - and also the number of 10MB+ attachments I have in there (i send videos, songs and pictures between friends and family). So Im trying to delete some of the big mails, hoping it might speed this thing up !
So, at the moment the Gmail IMAP feature for me is useful (eg. I can send emails from Mac Mail that get stored in Gmail sent folder), but not stable enough to rely on to receive.
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:09
I am also having he same issue with Leopard mail, but have noticed that this has become progressively worse in the past week or so. Any other ideas as to why this is occurring?
January 18th, 2008 at 14:34
I’m also having this same problem. Has anybody figured it out?
January 30th, 2008 at 11:23
I believe it is because we all have so much mail — and Gmail insists on IMAP synchronization of the ALL MAIL “folder”. Plus, for every label you have on every email, you now have an added IMAP copy of the mail header that has to be checked. 20,000 emails - with 3,000 of those having 2 labels each, means there are 26,000 records to be checked each time IMAP synchs…. right?
February 3rd, 2008 at 17:06
To jj :
I agree, but this sure is not the reason why the download rate is limited to 1~2KB/s…
I also have this problem on OSX 10.5 Mail, but I didn’t on OSX 10.4. This problem is very obscure to me.
February 7th, 2008 at 09:40
Ugh. Yeah, I’ve just come across this issue with Mail.app in 10.5.1, too. I’ve since switched to Thunderbird, which has worked flawlessly for me so far. Something’s rotten in the the city of Cupertino…
February 9th, 2008 at 17:57
It is even worse on the iPhone!
February 10th, 2008 at 13:49
KMail is the same, so I have to think that part of the blame lies with GMail.
February 27th, 2008 at 09:58
[...] Note, the IMAP sync to gmail’s “All Mail” folder was rather slow, as has been noticed elsewhere. Also, my spam folder is filtered on the gmail side so that items in it do not appear as unread. [...]
February 27th, 2008 at 10:16
No solutions here. I just gave up on gmail imap on my iBook G4. It stunk up the place in Mail, Entourage 2004 and Entourage 2008.
A 1and1 imap account worked fine, using Entourage 2004, so I think it’s a gmail issue.
Oddly, gmail imap seems just fine on my iPhone. Too bad I can’t use the iPhone settings on my iBook to improve the performance.
February 29th, 2008 at 07:55
I have the same problem. As much as I wanted to use Leopard’s mail for the seamlessness in the OS, I had to stick with my guns and use Thunderbird, which works flawlessly.
March 12th, 2008 at 17:58
This problem is for real on IMAP. The issue is real and I suspect gmail is to blame and overloaded. It is very SLOW on Outlook on Windows XP and very slow on Apple Mail. Not acceptable. POP3 is fine. Gmail IMAP i just not ready!