Mail wants me to set up from scratch

Question

Level 1

0 points

Mail wants me to set up from scratch

Mail was fine yesterday - today it didn't respond to 'get messages' and now it is asking me to 'set up mail'. I seem to have lost everything - including all messages sent and received over the past three years, and the addresses...
Can anyone help?
PLEASE!
If you can, please talk in baby-speak! Am not very good at computer terminology and am terrified of freezing the whole darn thing...
Or maybe I should just say 'good-bye' to the lost e-mails and start afresh?

iMac 2.16GHz Inetl Core 2, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Aug 3, 2010 12:03 PM

Reply

Answer 1

BDAqua

Level 10

239,111 points

Aug 3, 2010 12:14 PM in response to Templemeads

Hi Templemeads, and a warm welcome to the forums! 🙂

Is there any chance you renamed your Home folder?

On the Desktop, double click on Macintosh HD, then find the Users folder & double click on that... how many Users show up there?

Reply

Answer 2

Templemeads Author

Level 1

0 points

Aug 4, 2010 1:48 AM in response to BDAqua

Hi BDAqua!
The Users folder contains the following:
A House icon whose folder contains 15 items, none of which relate to e-mail.
A 'Shared' folder, which contains Garage Band Demo songs folder and another folder named UDF which has 9 files - non of them relate to Mail...
Does that help?
Thank you for any help you can give me!

Reply

Answer 3

BDAqua

Level 10

239,111 points

Aug 4, 2010 2:08 PM in response to Templemeads

OK, Doesn't appear to be what I was thinking.

Check if these exist & back them up sr safety...

On Mail...

First Quit Mail, then I'd backup these two Mail folders, by right clicking on them in the Finder, then choose Archive/Compress.

Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail

Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail Downloads

(Could be a different folder here if you chose such in Mail Prefs)

Right click on that Mail folder, choose archive, you'll get everything in the folder, and the folder itself in a file called Mail.zip, move it to a safe place, same for the Mail Downloads folder... only the plist is separate.

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

For Address Book...

Files...

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.plist

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.abd.plist

Folders...

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Caches/com.apple.AddressBook/

Reply