Is there a way to make Gsuite less painful with Apple Mail?

Is there any way to enable push email for Gsuite accounts?

I have tried other applications for email (official Gmail, Airmail, etc.) and have not found one that is stable and has good integrations with Apple services.

I’m forced to use Gsuite for work and every day I end up with someone on the phone who emails me something and I have to refresh for usually a couple of minutes before the email comes through. It’s just embarrassing having to ask my colleagues to constantly hold and wasting so much time. I do not use my iCloud email for work and need to keep them separate, but if someone sends it there it is always instant.

This is seriously starting to drive me crazy!

This is another annoyance in a seemingly endless list of problems with the service. Last year they lost three years of my business emails due to a “bug” on their servers, and another “bug” meant the backups were corrupted so they couldn’t recover any of it.

It’s easily the worst service I’ve ever encountered. Even AOL and Hotmail were much better.

I could have sworn they stopped push email to other clients a few years back. There used to be a way to add the account differently in setup (like not choosing Google, but adding settings manually) that was a workaround, but I don’t know if that is true anymore.

Sounds like you should also be shopping for a new email service if GMail has been this frustrating for you. Sorry to hear!

I use it because the company I work for forces me to.

If I’d had any choice, I’d have said good riddance a long time ago!

1 Like

I assume you tried the web interface to Gmail. What do you find unacceptable about it? Just curious.

I’m in a similar situation to you but my company requires me to use Outlook and Office 35. O365 is OK but Outlook is not software I am happy with. For a while I was able to use O365 with Apple Mail but the company closed off that option a year or two ago.

My personal mail is on … wait for it … G Suite. And I’m happy with it. My first thought on reading your message was that I had not encountered the problem you describe. But then I realized I never get email that urgent on my personal account. If it takes a few minutes to get through, that’s fine. And I use the web interface anyway.

What if you use the GMail app for notifications then go to your client of choice to read it?

1 Like

IMO, it’s not just Gmail. We had about 150 Macs on our network and had problems with mail.app about every other time it got an upgrade. Most of that time we were running our own email server. One version, a few years ago, was so flaky that we were forced to install Thunderbird on many of our Macs.

I’ve been a Gmail user since the early beta days and have two personal domains hosted by Google. While the best results come from running Gmail in the Chrome browser, I get excellent results using mailplane. On IOS, I run the gmail.app.

Google has excellent phishing safeguards that only work in their IOS & Android apps or in webmail (& mailplane). That is enough reason for me to recommend it. That said, I do keep Apple mail set up on my mac & iOS devices for occasional use.

After 11+ years of fighting the problem, I have given up hope of Apple ever solving their mail client problems.

FYI I use the following free Chrome/Brave extension to make Gmail cleaner and easier to use. It was developed by a former Google engineer:

Here’s an article about it from last month:

I also use a few other extensions (like PixelBlock, which blocks tracking pixels embedded in emails [which can tell the sender if you opened the email and what time, location, operating system, and device were to do it]) for privacy; unless you have some sort of system-wide blocker on Mac/iOS privacy is better in Gmail if you use the web interface with add-ons like this one.

1 Like

I thought Gsuite (not free Gmail) still used Exchange-style “push.” Not so?

https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/7649685?hl=en

I was hoping someone had a way of enabling this in mail, that was the point of the thread.

For me logging into webmail isn’t a good solution, each time I access I get forwarded to my institution log in page then on mobile safari in particular I have problems opening and managing files.

Is there any workaround that anyone knows of to get the push notifications working? I have read that it was possible in the past but the instructions I’ve found do not work anymore.

I know I can use webmail or another app but I want a more efficient workflow.

I have two other accounts for other jobs, non-google, and they both work perfectly with push. I can’t use these accounts for my main job though for legal reasons (GDPR). It’s clearly not a problem with Apple Mail, but with Gsuite. I live in hope that there is a fix or a workaround out there somewhere!

If no fix exists, I’ll have to live with it I guess.

Just to give another perspective.

My company has been using G Suite for over 10 yrs. I started using Mac and Apple Mail about 8 yrs ago. Push mail has never been a big problem for me. Yes, it takes 1-2 seconds longer than than other email clients (Outlook, Gmail web), but that is not a big deal.

If I get the situation you described, I just click the Get Mail icon, and my mail shows up almost immediately.

I have the same issue and use the workaround that @HobbyCollector suggested. Enable notifications in the Gmail app and use Mail to send and access emails.

1 Like