I'm using Apple Mail Client (on a Mac obviously) to use my Premium Email service with IMAP. I often get emails in my inbox in Apple Mail with an error message that tells me that this particular email was not downloaded and to take the account online in order to read it. Well, the account is online as I can read and reply to other emails.

In these situations, I reluctantly launch my browser and read these emails with web mail which has no problems. It's just unfortunate to go back and forth to check emails in two places since it defeats the purpose of having the great benefits of IMAP.

The only "pattern" I can see is that it seems to happen when the sender is using hotmail or maybe even yahoo mail.

Anyone have the same issue or a solution?

thanks

I understand your frustration.

We have a large number of Mac Mail users who experience similar issues.

One thing I've noticed is if your inbox is greater than say about 10MB (depending on your connection speed) Mac Mail will time out.

I've searched to find a method to increase the default timeout for Mac Mail to no avail.

[My post on macosx.com]
http://macosx.com/forums/mac-os-x-system-mac-software/294477-mac-mail-timeout-settings.html

You may want to attempt to move messages out of your inbox such as spam before downloading it through mac mail by way of Spam filters to decrease the total size of your inbox.

Another cause of problems is if Mac Mail gets hung up reading the email headers of a message, typically moving the offending message to a new folder will allow you to process mail normally.

If I find a solution to this problem I'll make sure to post it here.

I'm not familiar with MAC, but do you have your IMAP settings to download headers only? And then get full message when read?

nathacof,

Thanks for your reply. My inbox is less than 10MB for sure but the overall domain is higher than that. I wonder if that is causing problems.

I'll keep researching.

It shouldn't matter than your domain size is larger (as it usually is) than the mailbox you're downloading to Mail. Often times, as Nate said, Mail gets stuck on corrupt headers. If you delete or move that message within the SmarterMail interface and then attempt to download the e-mail via Mail, it should work.

I'm currently discussing with Apple the issues with SmarterMail 4.x and the Mac platform (mainly Safari) with some of the bugs, so hopefully we can come to a solution for those issues.