Help with incoming email-NOT working right.

Oops--and even weirder, I am getting some emails onto my iPhone (3G), but not to my Mac. How is that possible? Clearly, I am clueless, but I'm getting a wee bit tired of all of this supposedly being "intuitive". It's anything but...

No, I'm on Lion. Not sure why my profile says Tiger, but if I chose that, it was by accident (I may have had Tiger with my old Mac).

I got YOUR email, so something works. 🙂

Not worried about my profile at present-not even sure how to do that, but I'll figure that out later.

I tried the reboot, which sounded like a sensible suggestion. It didn't work. But here's the thing: I saw on my iPhone that I had 5 new emails today. I opened 3 of them, but left 2 deliberately unopen to check them on my laptop (which is where I'm having trouble with email). I know I had 2 messages outstanding. They did not appear in my inbox (although the ones I had opened did). I tried "Get New Mail"-no success. I then checked my iPhone and they were still there--AND AS I WATCHED, THEY DISAPPEARED BEFORE ME. What on earth? They are gone. They're not junk, not in deleted messages, not in my inbox on either device, nothing. GONE.

How does this happen? After that, I tried the reboot, to no avail. Is this a glitch on my hardrive? Is it Apple's way of driving me insane? This is a new MacBook. I am stumped. Please keep trying. I'm open to suggestions. Thank you.

Nope-I misunderstood. You want me to sign out of iCloud, then reboot the whole computer? I will do so in a minute. Thank you for trying to help me! I have updated my profile as well.

Ok, just went into System Pref > iCloud > turned mail off > rebooted entire computer > signed back into iCloud > found my mail (NOT THE EMAILS THAT HAD DISAPPEARED). Went into my mail in my Dock and 😮 no mail AT ALL! Then remembered had turned mail off > turned mail back on, restored my mail (but not the messages that disappeared themselves).

Sent myself a test email. Nothing. No success. Like I have time to drive 40 minutes to get to the Genius Bar this month.... 😐

Any other ideas?

Ok. All my mail is there--NOT the ones I sent to myself as tests and NOT the ones that disappeared in front of my eyes. One of those was from a friend who has just had a baby. I asked her to resend and she did. I opened it on my iPhone and so it's in my inbox.

In fact, everything I open on my iPhone is in my inbox on my laptop and in iCloud. But if I see the little red icon telling me I have mail on my iPhone, I never see new mail in my inbox in my Mail in the Dock. And my incoming server to Mail remains greyed out.

So, the quick and dirty solution that I'm using now is to open all my mail on my iPhone and then actually read it and deal with it once I get home. Yes, I am that antiquated. I don't check my personal email while at work (and I'm not even sure how to do so, but now that you've shown me the url to do so, I may change my habit...probably not. 🙂 ). But I do realize my Mail should not be acting this way. I dislike dealing with email on my phone-the screen is small and I dislike typing one-fingered or double-thumbed.

Anyway, thanks for sticking with me. I truly hope this is not a defect in my MacBook. The last time I had a defect in my MacBook, it was quite spendy... If it turns out to be that, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing.

Forgot to gray out my full name. Will post screen shot again. Sorry!

Hey, I learned about Grab and capturing/saving a screen shot--something I can do on my work PC, but have never attempted to do on a Mac. It wasn't easy (by now you may have cottoned on to the fact that I find this stuff hard--incredbily random and arbitrary-but I digress). So, I hope my screen shot helps you to help me. I am quite proud that I figured out how to gray out the addies.

Still no change with my email EXCEPT that today, for the first time, I got one junk item. I'd love to know how to prevent the junk, period (and I never used to get spam until last year), but one thing at a time...

Two queries:

1. How does one set up a password for incoming mail? And why? ****, I'm not sure if I had one and now don't or never set it up. And if I'm to access email "remotely", I have to login into iCloud anyway, so would I need to have yet another layer of something that could (and will) go wrong? Just curious.

2. What outgoing server info? The outgoing server info displays on the first screen shot I posted. I just went into Mail > Pref > Accounts etc and what you see is what I see.

I googled Mac Help for screen shots and found the utility Grab, but in order for me to post the images in an accepted format here (?), I had to use Preview to save the shots as pngs. Whatever works! But thanks for the tip.