(Mac Mail) How to obtain Yahoo! Mail when: You're inbox dissapears or does not show after all settings seem perfectly in place.

Question

Hello everyone!
Note**: I am in no way attempting to illustrate how to get FREE email listing from Yahoo! Mail, I am only reciting what I have stumbled upon. I do not know if Yahoo! actually wants this to work in Mail. but it does, so if they didn't want it to work they will patch it or something. I recommend that you take advantage of their paid service(annual) which allows POP forwarding of emails quickly and withou any need for reconfiguration.
      I hope this "fix" is not being rementioned or creates redundancy, however after hours of searching all sorts of foums(including the Apple forums ofcourse) I was unable to find a true fix. Simply put, I just got a brand new Macbook Air 13'' for Christmas 2011. I also bought a Macbook Pro 15'' back in late 2010. I was never able to get Yahoo! Mail configured even through methods of IMAP rather than POP or POP3. Oddly enough, on my Macbook Air and Pro, now, when I try to redo the Yahoo! settings, my Inbox would display messages for a matter of seconds and then the messages would dissapear. However, there was still a number next to my Yahoo! e-mail, accurately indicating how many unread messages I had. I fixed it like so:
1) Go to www.yahoo.com-- Configure Yahoo! account via account settings to work off of IMAP rather than POP Forwarding. Do so by going into account options on the top right or left hand of your screen and clicking through the forwarding options until you see IMAP. Make sure you save your new settings! This is very simple and I feel requires no further explanation. If you become confused, let me know and I will go into detail then.
2) Once your Yahoo! Mail account is IMAP simply go into the Mail application on OSX (Mac). On the top bar of the Mail pane click on the "Mail" option in between the Apple sign and File.  Then, Click on Preferences from that dropdown pane. When this window appears, Click on the "@" symbol that says "Accounts" right under it. This is in between General and RSS options. Under the left-hand list that says "Accounts", click on the "+" sign as opposed to the "-" sign you will see there. This will allow you to setup an account or additional accounts. A window then will appear with options:
3) ****Make sure you ARE connected to the internet wirelessly or via ethernet for this part!****
---------- Full Name: (Enter Full Name Here)
---------- Email Address: (Type in full email address, e.g.: [email protected])
---------- Password: (Type in your password to your email account, this IS CASE SENSITIVE.)
4) Now! Listen! (lol), hit create and let the mac show you the settings it has pinged back from the Yahoo! mail server. It should illustrate that your e-mail is an IMAP based email address etc. As long as the account is created with the IMAP configuration and Mail reads it as so, you have succeeded thus far.
5) Critial Step here: Go into the Mail application on OSX (Mac). On the top bar of the Mail pane click on the "Mail" option in between the Apple sign and File.  Then, Click on Preferences from that dropdown pane. When this window appears, Click on the "@" symbol that says "Accounts" right under it. This is in between General and RSS options. Under the left-hand list that says "Accounts", click on the Yahoo! IMAP account. Close to the top of that page between the different Mail options and the account settings you will see three different bar pages: a) Account Information, b) Mailbox Behaviors and c) Advanced.
6) Click on the Advanced tab. Do not touch anything on this page, except, IMAP Path Prefix. This is located in the middle of the Advanced page screen right above Port, where you will see |Port:   993   (Box IS checked for: USE SSL). In that IMAP Patch Prefix type the name of your Inbox(I say this because some people rename it in Yahoo!). Mine is simply "Inbox" so my configuration in Mail looks like so: | Imap Path Prefix:  Inbox |. After this, click on "General" or attempt to close the Mail options window and it will as you to save the new setting. Ofcourse, hit yes and click the Get Mail envelope and you will see your Inbox populate, assuming you have new mail.
What this means: Test your OUTGOING mail server by sending yourself an e-mail either from your Yahoo! Mail or from another email. Thus, this will allow you tot est your INCOMING email as was now reconfigured to IMAP by seeing if you actually receive the email.
Reason for doing so in this sequence: By letting Mail create the account it will properly import all of your mail folders you have in your Yahoo! Mail account. Obviously, your Inbox and Outbox as well as Sent and Trash folders will import but I have additional folders, for example, that also imported for putting financials or receipts into different folders for organization. Once these are populated naturally, by changing the IMAP Path Prefix you're telling the Mail application where to send your new emails. Atleast this is my understanding of it.
Unfortuntely, I am not an officially educated 'techie", however, I have been fiddling with computers over the last 20 years and have been training myself to become Apple expert, seing as I have decided to completely convert to Apple products. Apple is just reliable. This, to me, is priceless. I truly hope I have helped you and that I have saved hours of Youtube video watching as well as forum searching for many. Should you have any questions, FEEL FREE to ask! I love helping others, hense why I have made this post(my first Apple post). Happy Holidays everyone and enjoy!

Answer 1

dechamp wrote:
What Mac Mail did was delete ALL inbox messages from my yahoo account, after one week from importing them to Mac Mail.
The Yahoo server did exactly what you Mail program told it to do.
Mail/Preferences/Account/Advanced - This setting is adjustable for each mail account.
I didn't know about this feature until it was too late. I have already unchecked it for future emails.
I was wondering if there is a way to retrieve these deleted messages back to my yahoo inbox.
Not Really, you could forward them to your account, after you've told your mail program not to delete the emails at all, but they will show up as being from you instead of the original sender. The originals at Yahoo have been dumped and probably purged. It would take an IT manager at Yahoo to manually replace the emails, not much chance of that.
I've already asked yahoo to "restore" my inbox to a day ago. That should help me with retrieving some of the messages back, I hope.
Also, I was wondering about the sync feature on the Mac Mail and what will actually happen if I use it. Does it apply to mail messages, or to address book and calendar entries?
The sync feature refers to IMAP email accounts like .Mac or .Me or an Imap gmail account. I didn't think Yahoo offered IMAP email accounts.
Apple's MobileMe membership will let you sync your Mail, AddressBook, Calender, personal website with iWeb, etc.
"MobileMe is a service that pushes new email, contacts, and calendar events over the air to all your devices. So your iPhone, Mac, and PC stay in perfect sync."
http://www.apple.com/mobileme/
I wanted to use Mac Mail, see if I liked it or not, then decide to get a MobileMe account. However, this is still a side note, since my yahoo account is my main email client.
You seem to be very well informed, and I was wondering if I can ask you to clarify a point for me. Do you know how to archive the inbox in the Mac Mail?
And thank you for answering my queries.