Apple Mail STILL does NOT sync with GMAIL...even with Mavericks 10.9.2...why?

Question

Apple MAIL still does not sync well with Gmail.
I have to close Apple Mail program down, re-load it, select "synchonize all accounts." Then MAYBE it will finally sync up. If not, I do this again and again. Then, randonmly it seems, it finally syncs.
My iOS devices sync instantly and accurately 100% of the time. When I pull down the inbox to update, it does so almost at once. Accurately.
WHY does Mavericks APPLE MAIL have so many issues STILL!? Worked fine before Mavericks? Is there a solution?
Mike

Answer 1

I'm not sure if you were seriously asking or just looking for a place to vent, but I've read a lot about this topic and so I'll give a brief reply.
Unfortunately, I've not seen a solution to this problem. Many people have had success with various "voodoo" solutions (re-starting or some variant) but there's really been no reliable, consistent answer to this problem. Most people seem to think that syncing was improved (but was not completely fixed) with the 10.9.2 update. The only "solution" I've seen is to move off of GMail.
As to WHY this is happening, well, again I've not seen anybody diagnose the problem in any scientific way, but the consensus seems to be that this problem started because Apple modified the way the Mail program stored and indexed a GMail account. Many people (including you) say "it worked fine before" and yes perhaps it did, but there was a big problem lurking.
As you might know, Google moved off the mail standard when they created their mail system. Now, this is a rant for another post, but IMO by doing that they should have provided code for 3rd-party mail clients to use their new mail system properly. But of course that would defeat any competitive advantage their own client had, so instead all they did was support an IMAP interface.
The problem is that when an email arrives at your GMail account, it is in your Inbox and also in the "All Mail" folder. This is not in concert with IMAP protocol where a message is only in one folder. So a naive IMAP email client downloads such a message twice. If a message happens to be in a several folders (tags in GMail-speak), an IMAP client downloads it several times. It might have looked like it was "working fine" to you, but for people who have many gigabytes of mail, this duplication is a big problem.
Likewise, if you search for an email, an unaware IMAP client will find it in multiple folders, and report back each copy. Anyway, you get the idea. Apple tried to improve their Mail client to support this, and unfortunately they have a big bug. Well, I say "big" because it really annoys me. Apparently it must be not be affecting a large percentage of Mavericks users or else they would have fixed it by now. Even more annoying, there's no "switch" to get Mail to act like a dumb IMAP client again. It appears to detect that it is talking to GMail and this new system kicks in automatically. (Perhaps this could be tricked by using some kind of proxy?)
So why is this not happening on iOS? Well, again, nobody knows for sure (and Apple isn't saying), but the theory is that they didn't implement this complex scheme on iOS (yet). Maybe they were first testing it out on Mavericks, or perhaps they didn't think it was worth the trouble because on iOS the Mail caches are typically much smaller. On a desktop machine, usually there is a copy of all your IMAP mail sitting on the disk. On a mobile device, only a few messages are kept around at any time.
Sorry I don't have more info to give at this time. Good luck.
Bark.