I used to love Apple's native mail client. Let me qualify that: I used to not notice Apple's native mail client. It worked like it should and never called attention to itself. But ever since updating to Mavericks, I have cursed version 7 of this app on a daily basis.
Apparently, I'm not alone. Discussion forums are clogged with tales of Mail-related woe. There have been problems sending attachments using Exchange accounts, Smart Mailbox malfunctions, Gmail account failings, an inability to use the search feature -- the list goes on and on. Apple did manage to squish a few of these bugs with the OS X 10.9.1 update in November, but there are still plenty of issues.
One of the more persistent (and ridiculous) ones I've experienced is the inability get new messages from a given server once Mail is open and running. My old strategy to force the "send and receive" action was to simply close and reopen Mail -- that is, when that was actually possible. (Turns out there's also a bug that prevents Mail from closing). Anyway, that seemed to work most of the time. Even if I had to Force Quit, I could get my new messages.
Apple hasn't fixed this problem, but the company did recently publish a less frustrating shortcut that achieves the same thing without having to shut down the app. Here's what to do:
Open Mail and choose "View." Next, select Customize Toolbar. You'll be presented with a number of options here, but what you want are the "Get Mail" and "Take All Accounts Offline" buttons. Drag them both into your Toolbar and click Done. Now to get new messages, click the Take Offline button followed by the Check Mail button.
It's worked for me so far, but yeah, I'm hoping 10.9.2 is going to put an end to this nonsense.
