Apple Mail app no longer connecting to incoming mail server

Hi.
I use the integral Apple Mail email client under OS X 10.8.
Until this afternoon, all was well and I could send & receive my emails without any problem. (Suggesting that all the server settings & preferences are correct in Mail.)
This afternoon Mail suddenly was unable to connect to my incoming (IMAP) mail server, and I still cannot get it to connect.
I do still receive email from the same server on my iPhone though, so that suggests that the server itself is working correctly.
I've tried quitting Mail and re-launching it, and I've tried editing the server settings, saving the new settings and then reverting to the old ones and re-saving, but to no effect.
The problem exists on both of the user accounts we have set up on this Mac, and both user accounts use the same IMAP server, but with different names of course.
I'm at a loss as to what might have occurred here, and an even further loss as to what else I can try to resolve the problem.
Anyone any ideas please?
ps. While I was typing this an email arrived in my Mail inbox! BUT... I still have the little !-triangles by the side of my account in Mail, and when I click on them the 'Alert' tells me that there 'may be a problem with the server or network' and, "The server returned the error: The connection to the server “imap.mail.yahoo.com” on port 993 timed out."
So it looks like I'm getting emails somehow, but there is still a problem somewhere.

I started having this same problem yesterday after installing the Safari 7.0.6 update.  This has to be a coincidence.
I have 11 email accounts setup in Apple Mail.  The only one working now is my work exchange email.  The rest are either accounts I host on my own OS X Mavericks Server using IMAP and SMTP over SSL except for two of them which are GMAIL and iCloud.
Same issue.  The iMac just displays the warning triangle symbol and when I click I get the Unable to Connect dialog with the message.
     There may be a problem with the mail server or network. Verify the settings for account “iCloud” or try again.
     The server returned the error: The server “p03-imap.mail.me.com” cannot be contacted on port 993.
I have verified the settings on all of my IOS devices and they are the same.  As with the original post, my IOS devices are all able to connect to all of my accounts without any problems.
To try and troubleshoot this issue I switched to another user account and tried to connect to one of my mail accounts and got the same Unable to Connect issue.  I then opened another email client (Thunderbird) and configured the email account exactly the same there (IMAP on port 993 and SMTP on port 587).  Thunderbird was able to connect and retrieve my mail without any problems.  As an additional test I opened up terminal and tried "telnet p03-imap.mail.me.com 993".  I was immediately connected to the iCloud server.
To sum up this does not appear to be a problem with the iMac, the user account, my mail server or the network.  It appears to be a problem with Apple Mail only.
I wonder if there is a plist file or something that needs nuking.

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