Mail, Contacts in 10.8 misbehaving

[tommaso]

With the 10.8 installation, my Address Book contacts and groups apparently didn't get properly imported into Contacts. And Mail.app hasn't been connecting with iCloud in order to get new mail.
I am able to use iCloud on a browser, but these two applications don't work properly.
What am I missing? What should I be looking for?
Thanks for input.
tommaso

[macmath]

I had a similar problem with Contacts, and that caused a problem with sending mail in Mail. I quit contacts, moved the ~/Library/ApplicationSupport/AddressBook/ (or whatever it is called, as I'm not at my Mac) to the Desktop, and then reopened Contacts. It connected to iCloud and accessed all my contacts and everything worked fine. I don't know what the issue is with your Mail however.

[tommaso]

macmath, that did the job for Contacts (except that I'll have to reconstruct my groups), but I'm still unable to connect Mail.app to iCloud. Hopefully somebody else will step up with help on that issue.
Thanks!

[macmath]

My groups were preserved. Is it going to be much of a difficulty for you to reconstruct your groups? Maybe you should keep the AddressBooks folder for awhile in case someone comes up with a more complete solution. Under Contact's Preferences, it gives you a chance to choose between the Local file and iCloud, and even before I switched out the AddressBooks folder from the Application Support folder, I could not get anything to show up in Contacts under the Local version (only under the iCloud version). That caused me to export the iCloud version to a file so that I would have some local copy in case the iCloud version disappeared somehow.

With respect to Mail and iCloud, I haven't turned on Mail access to iCloud yet in the iCloud preferences because I don't know exactly what is stored in iCloud from Mail. If it stores actual Mail, then most of the 5 GB would be gone.

I wonder.... Perhaps Contacts and Mail won't operate properly under iCloud until the totality of their records have been uploaded into iCloud. If you have a lot of contacts or mail data then that might take awhile.

[tommaso]

It'd be a bit of a task to reconstruct groups, but not insurmountable. Sometimes an issue like this can be a good thing, in order to force one to re-evaluate the currency of the groups.
Good idea to save the old preference folder; I'll do that.
What was your method of exporting the iCloud version of Contacts?

[macmath]

Quote: Originally Posted by tommaso What was your method of exporting the iCloud version of Contacts?

While your contacts are visible in Contacts, select "Export" from the File menu (I believe that is where it is located...I am still not at my Mac) and of the two available options, choose the Archive one (not the vCard option).

[tommaso]

Okay on that.
While searching for more information about my issue, I found a reference for an Apple KB article at http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4002 which says, in part,
"Verify your SMTP server settings with the following information:
Incoming Mail Server: imap.mail.me.com
User Name: Your iCloud email address
Password: Your iCloud password"

I found, however, that my account shows p99-imap.mail.me.com as the inbound mail server, and it's greyed out so that I can't change it to imap.mail.me.com as prescribed in this article.

I even went so far as to delete my mail account and try to set it up anew, and the "add account" function uses that same funky inbound mail server information and doesn't allow it to be changed...

[agentx]

This is to be ignored.
When you setup iCloud on a Mac then you will get a "dedicated" server address where your iCloud data is served from such as pXX-imap.mail.me.com.

The instructions you are looking at is for setting up third party programs such as Outlook, Thunderbird etc and should be ignored if you have configured the iCloud preference pane.

[agentx]

As far as your mail issue. Have you used Connection Doctor to get any clues what is going on

from Mail > Window > Connection Doctor and also show detail with gives all the geek stuff. This will tell you what the problem is 90% of the time.

[tommaso]

agentx, here's what I found with Connection Doctor:
red dot under status, and details said: "Could not connect to this iCloud IMAP server. Check your network connection and that you entered the correct information in the Account preferences. Also verify that the server supports SSL. If it does not, deselect the "Use SSL" checkbox in the Advanced tab of Account preferences."
When I upgraded from 10.7.4 to 10.8, I assumed (yeah, I know...) that all my settings would work, and that my iCloud connection would continue to work as it had for months under 10.7. Not so...
But why?
Is there something else I should be looking at ?
Thanks.

[chabig]

Quote: Originally Posted by tommaso I even went so far as to delete my mail account and try to set it up anew, and the "add account" function uses that same funky inbound mail server information and doesn't allow it to be changed...

Try deleting your account in Mail, and then going to System Preferences > Mail, Contacts & Calendars and add a new iCloud account using your existing username and password. I suspect your problem has something to do with the MobileMe to iCloud transition. This will set up the iCloud account from scratch.

[tommaso]

chabig,
Unlike other times when I've checked out that pane in System Preferences, this time Mail was unchecked. When I checked it, it gave me a message that it was setting up Mail for me, but timed out and said to try again later.
I'm pretty sure the Mail checkbox hasn't been unchecked before, but I hadn't checked it right after deleting my account in Mail, either. What I'm experiencing in Mail is that, even when I've tried deleting my account, when I quit Mail and restart it, the account is there again.
I'll try that checkbox again later...

[chabig]

I bet it will work later. I went through some kind of transition around July 1st. My email account in Mail says iCloud right now, but I don't think it used to say that. I think there was a day I couldn't get email and I did some fiddling around and when I got it back it said iCloud. I think I did what I suggested you do.

[tommaso]

I'll try to be patient in the meantime... sure sucks having things like this happen.

What would happen if I were to delete my iCloud account then try to set it up anew? Would I lose all my server-side emails and contacts, etc.?

[tommaso]

Almost hate to ask this question, but, if I can't get this issue resolved, how would I go about downgrading to 10.7?

[NaOH]

Quote: Originally Posted by tommaso What would happen if I were to delete my iCloud account then try to set it up anew? Would I lose all my server-side emails and contacts, etc.?

Removing those accounts from your Mac would not mean your email or contacts would be deleted. The iCloud servers are where that information is stored, so removing the account from your Mac is essentially an operation which just says, "Don't put that iCloud information on this computer."

[ganbustein]

Quote: Originally Posted by tommaso Almost hate to ask this question, but, if I can't get this issue resolved, how would I go about downgrading to 10.7?

If push comes to shove, Time Machine has no qualms about restoring your whole boot volume to a time when you were running a previous version of the OS. Having done so, Time Machine will happily move your home folder (or selected documents) forward in time to just before you rolled the OS back.

There may be a little cleanup left to do. (Lion versions of your apps might not like Mountain Lion versions of their documents or preference files, for example.) You might want to run the 10.7.4 combo updater again, to restore your Recovery HD partition.

If you change your mind, Time Machine will happily bring you back to 10.8 the same way.

But all that would be a last resort. I have every confidence you won't need to revert the OS to fix your issues, especially given that, as others have mentioned, your Mail and Contacts data actually lives in the cloud. Mountain Lion is, if anything, even better equipped than Lion to give you access to it.

[tommaso]

After three days of dealing with this issue, Mail just worked all of a sudden. Maybe all my emails had to be downloaded to my MBA from the cloud, and it wouldn't work until all were downloaded?
Thanks to everybody for their input and suggestions.