How to sync email account settings between mail app on Mavericks, and iOS 7?

Question

Prior to Mavericks, when one synced an iOS device using iTunes, the email account settings for all email accounts configured in OSX would be "synced" with the iOS device.

Unfortunately, in Mavericks, some "genius" decided to remove that feature from iTunes. As a result, one can no longer sync email account settings between OSX and iOS this way.

I manage many domains, and as a result rely on the "Mail" apps in both iOS and OSX. Because this feature has been removed, it has become extremely tedious to update the settings on each of my devices by hand, instead of having to do it just once in OSX and sync my devices.

• I cannot use "iCloud keychain", because there is no webmail for many of my domains.
• I do not want to use Gmail, or some other webmail service.
• I just want to be able to make settings changes in OSX's mail app, and have the changes synced in my iOS device.
• Downgrading to a previous version of OSX, or switching to Windows or Linux is not an option.

Is there a way to do this ?

Answer 1

There is no pre-packaged way to do this because Apple has killed SyncServices in Mavericks. That is the framework used in past versions of MacOS and in iTunes for Windows to sync a wide variety of data types between multiple devices and applications, most commonly contacts and calendar information. It was also used in the old MobileMe settings and keychain sync feature. For reasons only known to Apple, they chose to abandon a mature and mostly functional (albeit imperfect) generic sync architecture that had decent documentation and was open to other developers and replace it with about half a dozen different sync systems for different apps and data types, in the process dropping sync features that previously worked well. Also, by creating a new subsystem for "Internet Accounts" synched between Macs (but not iOS devices) based on iCloud with chronic breakage and almost no documentation, they've assured that it is their own private mess that only a few people notice or really care about.