Apple mail (imap) not showing USER folders

No I didn't try this, and whether it works or not, I'm still in the same situation.

I DID try deleting the mail account from my user and setting it up from scratch, and that did not fix the issue. mail send and receive is fine, except it sees no user folders.

I am not sure what you mean. If create a folder in my email account, no matter how I do that, then any imap client should see that folder and allow you to subscribe to it, i.e. to show it. I can not create a folder from apple mail, nor does apple mail see a folder created via a different client (in this case the squirrelMail web interface).

comcast is just my internet provider, not the email provider. When I mentioned that the original problem was with comcast, that was that they were not properly routing to my email provider so I got timeouts when the site was not in fact down. But the has nothing to do with the mail folder issue (I likely should not have mentioned it in the first place).

Thanks, I did try a blank Imap prefix, but will do so again.

interesting that there are lots of posts etc about issues with Apple mail and folders which isn't exactly encouraging, but I did have it all working before my recent meltdown, so there is hope (or so I keep telling myself :-)

I resolved this issue. It was just having the proper config. it was further complicated by my intermittent access to my email provder, and that problem I have not yet resolved.