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macOS 10.14.4 Mail Client Has Broken Gmail Access For Some Users (apple.com)
New submitter _observer writes: Hundreds of users are unable to read their Gmail in Apple's Mail client since the upgrade to macOS 10.14.4, with few workaround available. This is impacting business and personal users, although not all Gmail accounts are impacted. The web client and other clients like Outlook still work -- it is only Apple's Mail client that is not playing along. Users say they are caught in a login loop. It appears that the issue was even found and reported in the 10.14.4 Beta, but not addressed when the update was released. No word from Apple about this. While I am somewhat sympathetic to the software engineers having bugs in code (I am an engineer, too), but this seems to be a big QA miss. Gmail is the most popular free email service and this is blocking a large number of users. This thread on the Apple Support forum is growing rapidly (24 pages and counting)
If you don't use google's DNS servers, Chrome likes to hang?
Booooo Apple
Reminds me of the old days where Microsoft Windows updates would regularly break Lotus spreadsheet.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I experienced the same issue this morning after upgrading, but the System Prefs prompted to re-enter the password. I did so and a Safari link opens up that asks for your Gmail password, then Gmail sends you a code you enter to confirm. It works after that. I believe this is only affecting Gmail users that don't have 2FA setup or those that previously used one-time codes for application access in Google.
meets fucked up imap mail server.
FFS this is not hard, we have Dovecot and Thunderbird. Working fine for decades.
Goddamn hipster artist kids. Stop letting them near the code. They're going to want to turn a solid c program into a c# or python app or some such shit. Send them home.
The mail client has been broken for awhile in my opinion it will check the settings and fail even though the settings are right. Just let me manually enter all the settings with no check/test.
I experienced the same issue this morning after upgrading, but the System Prefs prompted to re-enter the password. I did so and a Safari link opens up that asks for your Gmail password, then Gmail sends you a code you enter to confirm. It works after that. I believe this is only affecting Gmail users that don't have 2FA setup or those that previously used one-time codes for application access in Google.
Well, my experience with 2FA and my gmail and google apps accounts is that I get the infinite loop hell. I just setup my google mail accounts in my (shudders) outlook app (that I don't use for anything else). Really bad move by Apple for not fixing this between beta and release.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
Another negative story about Apple seemingly every day... Can't say it makes me sad. We should start a gofundme for all the affected hipsters though.
I am not left-handed, either!
The whole appeal of Gmail is to read Gmail in the nice Gmail client, where you can just search for your emails instead of trying to organize them. Who in their right mind would read the emails in a clunky mail reader like Mail.app? Apple's Mail program was great in the days of like, Tiger.
This hit me as well, I have around five gmail accounts that no longer work - the interesting thing is, if I delete and try to re-add them, it can't even get account details from Google to complete the add.
The really curious thing though, is that one lone gmail account is working just fine! What the heck.
Because two email accounts still worked (iCloud still works of course, as does this other gmail account) I didn't really notice until this morning there was an issue... including one outbound email that never went ... out.
For a workaround I re-added my most important accounts as imap only accounts, that still works at least. But it's pretty bad they shipped a bug with this magnitude (and the 10.14.5 beta 1 release just out, does not fix it either).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, the system pref prompted me to re-enter my passwords as well. After entering, Mail.app still shows accounts as offline, and eventually I am re-prompted... after about eight tries I figured it was probably not going to work. Also tried a reboot (which 10.14.4 helpfully auot-provided for me in the middle of processing a password entry response), but still cannot access the affect gmail accounts... to receive new email or send anything out...
As I said in my other message, the workaround for me was to add important gmail accounts as IMAP accounts so I can see and respond to email, I can just delete those whenever they figure out the fix for Mail.app.
I feel like this is a bug related to processing the authentication from Google, because trying this out on a laptop that is still on 10.14.3, Mail.app does NOT send you over to Safari to authenticate, it happens within dialogs. Somewhere the auth transfer is failing for some cases, they should have tested the hell out of a change like that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From past experience, expect that thread to disappear/get locked soon....
AC comments get piped to
My question: Iis this a case of defective by design or a case of a bug affecting a competitor so they didn't give a damn to fix it since they were alerted during the beta? (Disclosure: I used to work for Apple.)
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Allow insecure apps, then use standard IMAP with either SSL or TLS authentication, not OAuth...
https://support.google.com/acc...
It's as secure as anything else if you use a strong password and aren't an idiot about entering it on phishing sites.
If you wanted to mess with gmail logins, there are lots of ways to do it that would break it - but it would break for all gmail accounts, not just some...
This is a case of a super-bad bug slipping past QA and the people that manage releases somehow (since they knew about this bug in the beta version). I don't see how they could ship a final release with this issue known about...
The real reason I don't think this is done by design, is that this bug does way more harm to Apple's relatively clean reputation of shipping updates you can generally trust to install (especially in point releases as this was 10.14.3 to 10.14.4). I turned of auto-updates on all OSX systems and will probably have that off for a few years now until I can be sure they are serious about shipping quality patches again...
I guess Apple engineers were too busy ogling Oprah to bother checking unfinished bugs before dropping a release.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've heard that 10.4.4 can also break apps using Metal graphics (the Mac equivalent to DirectX or Vulkan). So if you are using your Mac to play games (other than Photoshop), you might want to hold off on that upgrade. That rules me out, since the only Macs good enough for gaming these days have screens glued on or RAM soldered down.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I had this, and turns out there's an incredibly simple solution: generate an app password on https://myaccount.google.com/ (under security). Then in macOS, delete the account in System Preferences and recreate it as a regular IMAP account.
I'm not sure it works for the calendar and contacts stuff, but it sure works for mail.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
It would be a miss if it affected all Gmail users. But it only affects a portion of them. Until the cause can be identified it is entirely reasonable to assume that this might not have come up in rigorous QA testing. And it is entirely unreasonable to assume that it should have come up in testing.
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
I don't know the details of this issue, but it is common knowledge that Gmail doesn't follow the standards for IMAP and similar protocols. Many makers of IMAP software have to scramble to get Gmail working in their mail clients. Apparently it is defective by design.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
None of the people involved in this are engineers.
Apple: Reasonably good software. But crappy crippled hardware.
Microsoft: Runs on some reasonably good hardware. But crappy crippled software.
Linux: Runs on reasonably good hardware. Phenomenally good software. But essential s/w programs are missing.
BSD etc.: Who? :-)
If you are a modern user of updated/modern Apple products, congratulations, you are a beta tester.
Apple still has alpha, beta, and release stages of software. The difference is that nowadays and for a while, Apple has evidently been calling alpha-quality software BETA, and calling beta-quality software RELEASE. I suppose what should be called a release-ready piece of software ends up being a bug-fix and security patch update.
Why does Apple do this? It is cheaper and therefore makes Apple and its investors more money, and Apple software and hardware users have been willing to tolerate it. Or feel they have no choice. Or have developed something akin to Stockholm Syndrome.
Do you dislike Apple charging you amounts of money for their products that would be appropriate and correspond with what you would expect to pay for actually ready for release, polished, finished, properly TESTED software? Do you still buy Apple Defective-By-Design garbage products for good money?
If so, then congratulations, by rewarding malfeasance, you are part of the problem.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
On a related note, why does Google keep sending me emails that using Thunderbird (on Linux) is a security problem. I think that it's more like a problem for Google's business model than a problem for me.
It works fine. Seems like someone is just being bitchy today about Apple.
Fire editor msmash
Dragged and dropped some emails to a folder. They disappeared. Not in the trash. Not in the destination folder or original folder. No help from Apple. Microsoft was no help either.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
My only gmail account is for stuff I don't much care about losing & I don't use Google's SAAS stuff so I never setup 2FA. Absolutely no issues after upgrading.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue