Unable to delete mail account

I figured out how to solve my problem! (The root of my problem may not have been the same as meglizwake's which started the thread—I don't know.)

In my case, the problem had to do with messed up permissions in files in ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData. Because the permissions in many of those files (notably, I think, Accounts.plist) had gotten set so that I couldn't read and write, whatever I did to change those preferences in Mail, including deleting an account, were not being saved.

The fix was simple: File > Get Info on each file in that folder and change whatever you have to change under Sharing & Permissions until it says, "You can read and write."

Thank you this resolved my issue.

oryhart

I figured out how to solve my problem! (The root of my problem may not have been the same as meglizwake's which started the thread—I don't know.)

In my case, the problem had to do with messed up permissions in files in ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData. Because the permissions in many of those files (notably, I think, Accounts.plist) had gotten set so that I couldn't read and write, whatever I did to change those preferences in Mail, including deleting an account, were not being saved.

The fix was simple: File > Get Info on each file in that folder and change whatever you have to change under Sharing & Permissions until it says, "You can read and write."

Hi OryHart, thanks for this post, I may have the same problem with my Mail acct and I feel I can follow the same steps to fix this issue but I have a question for you. Onece you went into ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData then you trash and delete Accounts.plist ? Or did you trash or delete any other document in MailData? Please let me know the step by step process you did in order to resolve my problem. Thanks a lot !

RC

Ok, this just worked for a customer:

trash contents of ~/Library/application support/mail/OnlineAccountTypes/com.apple.updated.mailaccounts/

restart

Hello All,

I wanted to pass a little extra love along. I am using Mavericks and had great pains removing the Yahoo Messenger account from INTERNET OPTIONS, and/or MAIL PREFERENCES. When I attempted to remove it by selecting the < - > to remove the account I received the prompt to enter the password for the Yahoo account. Entering the PW caused the SYSTEM PREFERENCES pane to ERROR.

What I did was:

First, quit Mail.app.

Method 1:

The fix is simple. Go to:

1. /Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Containers/

2. delete the folder com.apple.mail

Method 2:

1. Open Terminal.app

2. rm -rf /Users/`whoami`/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail

Scarlac's tip.

Then I had to go and make the Yahoo account inactive, then I could remove it all together.

After closing mail I used a plist editor and edited:

/Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Accounts.plist

(as always TAKE A BACKUP)

I removed all key pairs to the offending account.

Voila.

Removed.

This worked for me as well.

My problem was similar, I've tried to delete Gmail mailboxes in Mail app and I got the same error "The operation couldn’t be completed. Unable to find an account for the UID given"... Following the first advices on this chat, trying to delete com.apple.mail was a mess, all my stuff gone, personal mailboxes (On My Mac), etc... so that's not a solution to me.

I've just performed some accurate, just follow this:

1- Edit Account.plist file located in /Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Accounts.plist with Xcode or a Plist editor (MAKE A COPY OF ORIGINAL Accounts.plist FIRST !!!, ex: copy it and rename it as Accounts_old.plist).

2- Look for each account you got with error (look for "MailAccounts" line, extend it, look for one by one each item (item 0, item 1, item 2, etc...) and locate "Account name" line in order to find the mailbox you want to delete, find it and delete the proper Item (ex: Item 3, Item 6, Item 8, and so on...). TAKE CARE ABOUT HAVING ACCOUNTS WITH SIMILAR NAMES OR EQUAL NAMES -same account name but different hosting, etc- DELETE THE PROPER ONE... just a tip: look inside each item content at the line that shows you the hosting provider like GMAIL, "YOUR DOMAIN", etc). Note that each time you delete an item the order of items is still the same (it's just a reorder of the content, the item you delete is really deleted... you know what I mean).

It worked for me.

P.S: it's an Alex Neil comment extended explanation 😉

I hope to help with this. Regards!

SGINARD's fix worked for me. Though I had to run through SGINARD's steps, then when I opened Mail it prompted me for a new account (because I deleted the only one I have), I created the new account, but there was still some residual issues and the new account was not working properly, but I was now able to delete the account "normally" and then recreate the account one last time which finally fixed my issue.

Thank you.

p.s. I was having issues with the original account no longer getting mails from my Exchange server.

One extra tip. If you have folders with local mail "On My Mac" Export the folders first. When you re-create the old account only the boxes that are on the server will be restored. You can then import the "On My Mac " folders. This worked for me. But I think some of the other methods in this list might have been easier since I had a lot of local mail.

Yes deleting the pairs in the ~Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Accounts.plist worked for me too

Just a find and delete with xcode... 🙂

Guess the folders are kept in ~LibraryMail/V2 ...

as backup

Thank you very much. It works!

I just spent 1.5 hours at the Genius Bar trying to get this same issue resolved. I had two accounts that I could not delete. They attempted everything they could think of deleting to get the mail accounts to clear up. But in the end the accounts still kept showing back up in Mail. [ and 3 Geniuses later]

Final Result: restored the Mac to factory settings and reinstalled programs fresh. I could have restored back to a recent backup but the Genius saw some things on the machine that indicated that there might be some corruption in other areas of the machine - although I was having no other issues.

Root Cause: according to the Genius they are seeing some problems because Mail is using the "cloud".

Take a look at a related discussion, I'm trying to set up a new account in the Mail dialog for Accounts, but get an error message "This account already exists". However, the account does not show up in the dialog, so there is no way to access it. This is on OS X 10.11. This may be the source of this problem.