OS10.5.5: Mac Mail not updating IMAP

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Hi everyone,

I've been poking around the forum, and was having trouble finding an answer to my question. If I missed something, please let me know. But if not... well, hopefully there is some help to be had for this.

I'm running 10.5.5 on a MacBook Pro (circa March or so). I've got several email accounts feeding into Mac Mail, one of which (my primary work address), is set up as IMAP. I get *a lot* of email in a day (often several hundred messages a day-- I'm a CS professor, and some of my classes I teach are huge, heh). I work with my email continually open so I can deal with things as they come in. For some reason, though, while my iPhone will pick up my new mail when I ask it to (I have it set to check on the hour otherwise), my laptop is only updated at an extreme delay. That is, new messages are only appearing after a long wait, sometimes an hour or more (and I do have it set to check at the highest frequency).

I can manually ask Mail to check for new messages, but it still will not find them. Yet if I quit Mail and reopen immediately, it will show the busy/wait signal next to the account, and it will find the new messages after a small delay. So I end up opening and closing Mail all day long, sometimes several times an hour when I'm waiting for important messages.

To further compound things, my email is constantly "resetting" in terms of read/unread and whether or not I've responded. I rely on those to keep my email straight, and this is proving frustrating. This is an issue I've had since I got my latest laptop, back in March or so. I seem to recall trying a few fixes that I found, but none of them worked (and I also recall people saying that this was an open, acknowledged problem with 10.5).

Lastly, I find that Mail gets "stuck" a lot, and I'm forced to close it and re-open it anyway.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!
 
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iMac 5.1 | iMac 7.1 | iMac 12.1 | iMac 19.1 | iPhone 11 Pro | Watch s5
Ditto. Mail in 10.4 worked perfectly.
 
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Interesting this. I've been experiencing at least the first part of the issue described for some months - i.e. MAC Mail using IMAP not updating with new messages. Have got into a habit of going offline/online to pick up new messages to get around it. But this is a very unsatisfactory workaround.

Now reviewing Thunderbird 3 beta 1 as an alternative which looks much better. (and now includes partial MAC AddressBook integration]. But some risk as it is beta.

Will be interested if anyone out there has a proper resolution for Mail tho.
 
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I've been experiencing the same problem with a large IMAP account of mine. Need to restart Mail constantly. The smaller account works no problem.

Switched to Thunderbird, and couldn't be happier. Email works the way it should. :D
 
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I have an IMAP account both on my imac and my itouch. Messages coming in for that account arrive first on the itouch and between 5 minutes to two hours later in my IMAP account on the imac. This sounds very similar and wonder if anyone has figured out why this is happening. I have been already 4 hours on line with Apple and One hour on line with the service provider Telus.
 

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