Mail - IMAP problem accessing inbox

I have an issue accessing my Yahoo Inbox using IMAP with Mail 8.1 on my MacBook Pro running Yosemite 10.10.1. The Connection Doctor confirms connection and login for both IMAP and SMTP. When I select Get Account Info at the bottom of the left column in the Inbox pane, the Quota Limits tab shows the number of messages in several mail folders I have on the server, but shows the Inbox with 0 messages, which is not correct. When I select Get New Mail from the Mailbox tab, the Yahoo mailbox is grayed out. On one attempt when it was not grayed out, it returned the message "The server returned the error: the attempt to read data from the server imap.mail.yahoo.com failed".

The following solutions found online have been tried without success:

--take account offline then Get All New Mail

--remove and reinstall the Yahoo internet account in System Preferences

--remove the Yahoo internet account, then re-add as an "Other" mail account

--delete com.apple.mail.plist files in the Library, then restore by restarting the program

--delete com.apple.mail folder in the Library, then restore by restarting the program

--reduce password characters to 8, alphanumeric

As a final attempt, I removed Mac OS X from the "Manage apps and website connections" section in my Yahoo account profile. I removed and restored the Yahoo account in Mail, but this did not restore Mac OS X in my Yahoo account.

IMAP access worked fine until just a few days ago. Access through Web browser and my iOS devices has fortunately been unaffected. What broke?

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1)

Posted on Jan 17, 2015 1:19 PM

19 replies

irene_s

Level 1

5 points

Jan 19, 2015 3:41 AM in response to irene_s

Replying with an update -- about 7 hours ago the emails in my Yahoo inbox appeared. No action on my side for the last 24 hours apart from keeping mail open and using the web view of Yahoo mail. So far, back to normal, although the Activity window shows unusually slow progress when synchronising with Yahoo.

So it _looks like_ a glitch on the Yahoo side. It's sad that Yahoo has no status page (happy to be corrected) or proactive way to notify users impacted by such issues.... so we don't spend hours trying to fix known server issues on 'our' side.

mehrvarz

Level 1

15 points

Jan 19, 2015 6:57 AM in response to irene_s

Problem appears resolved.

nwis03 Author

Level 1

10 points

Jan 19, 2015 9:59 AM in response to nwis03

Yes, my mail is now coming through again, too. I also think Steve has a good point; I'm going to delete much of my back mail. Thanks, everyone, for your research and sharing on this. The community really works!

Jan 19, 2015 10:02 AM in response to nwis03

Same here, so, in the end I was right, it was a yahoo server problem, nothing to do with apple's mail.

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Mail - IMAP problem accessing inbox