Apple Mail IMAP Path Prefix not working

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Level 1

123 points

Apple Mail IMAP Path Prefix not working

Last week I upgraded my iMac from Snow Leopard to El Capitan. At first, the mailboxes on the iMac didn't look the same as they did on my MacBook (running Sierra). Once I discovered the advanced setting of IMAP Path Prefix and entered "INBOX" into that field, the mailboxes on the iMac straightened out.

Yesterday I upgraded the iMac to Sierra, and something went wrong. Even though the IMAP Path Prefix setting still says "INBOX," the prefix is not showing up in the Mailbox Behaviors settings window, and the mailboxes in Mail itself are back to being a jumbled mess. Apparently, the "INBOX" setting isn't being recognized properly.

Here are screenshots of the Mailbox Behaviors windows from my MacBook (left) and iMac (right); note the absence of the "INBOX" prefix on the iMac:

If I log out of my normal account and log in to the iMac through a test user account, the "INBOX" prefix works fine. So apparently something is corrupted in my account's settings for Mail. Can anyone suggest how I might fix this problem? Thank you!

iMac (27-inch Mid 2011), Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Mar 16, 2017 4:31 PM

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Answer 1

tygb

Level 9

64,742 points

Mar 19, 2017 12:03 AM in response to Patty1

You can read this article : Mail for Mac: Mailbox Behaviors preferences in Mail

You have not mentioned which mail services are you using , if you try to manually click on drop down arrows of sent mail box in iMac computer that is shown in your screen shot , can you do that or it reverts back and don't save .Using as iCloud service the setting is shown in the screen shot .And you also wrote that if you create a second test account the settings are correct and are saved , might be a corrupt mail account or system files could be corrupted .Read this article : How to test an issue in another user account on your Mac - Apple Support and also run safe mode .

And google services as .

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Answer 2

Patty1 Author

Level 1

123 points

Mar 19, 2017 9:53 AM in response to tygb

Hi, tygb. I didn't mention my ISP because I don't think it's relevant. IMAP connections to them were working fine on my MacBook. As for selecting mail folders, non of the drop-down menus had "INBOX/" as options.

The fact that another user account brought the expected behavior led me to the same conclusion as you--that there were corrupted settings in my usual account. I logged in to my account, then deleted and re-created the Internet account for my ISP. When I launched Mail again, all was okay. The mailbox structure on my iMac now looks as clean as that on the MacBook. So something apparently got corrupted in the upgrade from El Capitan to Sierra on the iMac.

Thanks to all for your suggestions.

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Answer 3

Patty1 Author

Level 1

123 points

Mar 17, 2017 10:22 AM in response to Eric Root

Hi, Eric. By "the 2 computers here," do you mean my screenshots? As I mentioned, one is from my MacBook and one is from my iMac. Both computers are sending and receiving mail just fine; the iMac just doesn't have the correct mailbox structure.

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