Apple Mail is not retrieving mail automatically from Exchange

I have an Exchange account set up in Apple Mail. When I click the "Get new messages" button it successfully retrieves mail from the Exchange server.

I have the "Check for new messages" setting in Mail to "Automatically" but it is not retrieving them automatically, I have to manually click the "Get new messages" button again to get the messages.

I have also tried setting "Check for new messages" to "Every minute" but this does not work either.

Initially restarting Mail seems to fix this, but the problem seems to re-occur every time I wake up my computer from sleep/hibernation. I don't want to have to restart Mail every time I do this.

Is there a known fix for this behaviour?

Solution 1:

After changing the Check for New Messages delivery settings you need to restart the Mail for it to take an effect.

Solution 2:

If your Mac is running 10.9.x, Apple has posted a Knowledge Base article about this issue. There's no fix, but Apple has a manual workaround included in the Kbase article:

Resolution

Quitting and reopening Mail forces it to re-establish a connection to the email server. You can use these steps to receive new mail messages without quitting Mail:

Choose Mailbox > Take All Accounts Offline.

Choose Mailbox > Get All New Mail.

As a shortcut, you can also add the Take All Accounts Offline and Get Mail buttons to your Mail toolbar.

Choose View > Customize Toolbar.

Drag the Take All Accounts Offline button to the Toolbar if it is not there already.

Drag the Get Mail button to the Toolbar if it is not there already.

Click Done

To receive new mail messages, click the Take Offline button, then click the Check Mail button.

OS X: New email messages not received until Mail is quit and reopened

Solution 3:

I've seen similar issues with Outlook on Windows. Rebuilding or recreating a user profile will sometimes fix it. According to Apple support, here's how to do a rebuild for Mail in OS X Mavericks and what it accomplishes:

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH14958?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

You might need to rebuild a mailbox to update the list of messages it contains. For example, if messages appear to be missing or garbled, or if you can’t find all relevant messages when you search using Entire Message.

Select a mailbox, then choose Mailbox > Rebuild. When you rebuild mailboxes for IMAP and Exchange accounts, locally stored messages and attachments are discarded, and the messages and attachments are downloaded again from the server to your Mac. Your mailbox appears empty until the download is complete.

Last Modified: Nov 6, 2013.