by Many users of the Mail app in OS X Mavericks have experienced significant problems, ranging from severe issues like randomly deleting emails to entire inboxes, to not signifying if emails have been read, amongst a wide variety of other more minor but annoying problems with the Mail app. Some of the issues have been so bad or annoying that a fair amount of OS X users had to stop using the Mail app completely, seeking alternative solutions, particularly for Gmail, to work around the bugs. But that is no longer necessary, and if you’re a Mail app user you can comfortably use Gmail and Mail in OS X Mavericks again without having to deal with some of the bugs and quirks that plagued the initial release.
Getting the essential Mail update for Mavericks is done through the App Store:
Quit Mail app
Go to the Apple menu and choose ‘Software Update’ to launch the Mac App Store
Head to the ‘Updates’ tab, refresh if necessary, and install ‘Mail Update for Mavericks 1.0’ by clicking Update
Relaunch Mail app
The Mail update is fairly small and installs quickly, weighing in around 32.46MB. Users should not need to re-add or delete any existing Mail accounts or services for changes to take effect, relaunching Mail is sufficient, though the app will resync with whatever mail service is setup and it may take a while for the mailbox to rebuild. If you continue to have to have issues you can also try to manually reindex and rebuild the mailbox, which often resolves quirks with Mail app for OS X in general.
Release notes for Mail Update for Mavericks 1.0 are as follow:
Mail Update for Mavericks includes improvements to general stability and compatibility with Gmail, including the following:
▪ Fixes an issue that prevents deleting, moving, and archiving messages for users with custom Gmail settings
▪ Addresses an issue that may cause unread counts to be inaccurate
▪ Includes additional fixes that improve the compatibility and stability of Mail
Users who would prefer to download the Mail update outside of the Mac App Store can get the direct download from Apple, this can be helpful for installing on a group of Macs running Mavericks, or to avoid bandwidth overages for capped data connections.
