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Mail refuses to show mailboxes

Mail 1.3.11 opens ONLY to the sent mailbox for one of 5 mailboxes. Nothing I do can get it to show the mailboxes to get or access mail. The "mailboxes" icon is grayed out in the menu.

This followed loss of the program when it literally disappeared from the MacMini. A copy of it was copied back to it from an external drive and it seemed to worked okay for a couple of days albeit the contents of some of the mailboxes was incorrect, which I corrected by replacing them from a backup. Strangely one of the 5 mailboxes is resorting to a mailbox that never existed but has the files in it that are needed. So I copied all those files and pasted them into the sent mailbox that is now the only one Mail will show.

I did not find MAIL on the original installation discs that came with the Mini. I plan to upgrate to Tiger to conform to family computers for common use of video conferencing. Will installing that cure the problem, or must it be fixed before the upgrade?

Mac Mini G4 1.43 GHz; 1 GB memory, Mac OS X (10.3.x)

Posted on May 23, 2008 9:52 AM

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3 replies

May 23, 2008 3:30 PM in response to Joeamber

If your settings or mailboxes are messed up, updating will not help - and might even exacerbate the problem. You should certainly do maintenance before upgrading in any case - repair disk, repair permissions.

How did you lose Mail? Maybe that did more damage than first appeared.

Try using the option to rebuild your mailbox in Mail. See if that helps.

- cfr

May 23, 2008 7:42 PM in response to Clea Rees

Permissions repaired; disk repaired, defraged using Drive Genius 2. None of that changed situation. How mail was lost is unknown. It was there the night before, next morning it was no there. To my knowledge I didn't do anything to it to cause that. Rebuilding the mailbox achieved nothing.

However I found help on this site back some 20 pages of messages on MAIL. From that I got mail up and accessing 3 of the 5 mailboxes. One is not setup right. The other had a pop-mailbox FOLDER with a totally different name than in the preferences; i was a pop-mail box that ended up with the POP-firstlastname@smtp.wunr when it should have been pop-firstlastname@sunriseunity.org. Finally I deleted all mailboxes in the right account; trashed the wrong account and started anew and imported the sent and received mail from a backup. The downside is that the imports show up in the separate mailboxes at the bottom of the list instead of IN the right mailboxes. But at least I can now get to them if needed. I may yet figure out how to merge then into the 'new' mailbox. Thanks for your help.

Mail refuses to show mailboxes

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