I have aol for mac. I can't figure out the mail or how to retrieve folders or mailboxes

Question

First, I don't know if I have a mac intel or a ppc.  I don't know what that means.  Anyway, I have had a pc and aol since the dinosaur days.  Just the other day I got a mac.  I have had iphones since they began and my boys have macs so I thought what the heck.  Well, it is so confusing I am pulling my hair out.  My husband says icloud is on my phone, ipad and mac.  I am having trouble keeping all my photos from automatically moving to my phone.  I don't want 1400 photos on my phone, only some of them and can't figure out how to make it do that.
This question though is about the mail.  I loaded aol onto the mac.  I wanted all my mail to transfer over like it always has when changing pc's.  But it did not give that option with the mac, so it just brought over my account but not my mail, saved folders and all.  I have folders for bills, shopping, insurance, christmas, many many things.  Probably 12-15 of them and when I get email in that I need to keep, I put it in one of those folders and can go back to it at any time.  However with the apple, they don't have folders, they are called mailboxes.  Now I finally figured out how to make new mailboxes for each subject.  However, they do not show up on the left under the mail stuff.  You have to go to toolbar once you highlight the email and go to view, then to move to or something like that, then you see the folders.  If you click on one, supposedly the email goes in there.  However, there is no way to tell for sure because you cannot go to them at all otherwise.  And you can't open the folder cuz it is not in bold unless you are putting something in there.  Then it goes away.  So I don't know if it went in there so I can't delete it and it just keeps piling up.  Also, my sent mail doesn't save automatically, nor does anything else.  Right now my email has a dash out where it says how many emails you have incoming, but it was never there before and I don't think I got any of my mail today that I got now that I am on the pc so how do I take that off.
Also on the on the mac list it says it has like 80 something there, but it won't let me double click or see what it is, so I don't understand.  I just want to get it organized.
Thank you so much for your time.  I appreciate all the help I can get.

Answer 1

Hi Janice
Fortunately, AOL keeps a copy of mail and folders on their server, so you can be reassured that the email is there, you just have to find a way to access it.
There are three ways to read AOL mail on your Mac.
- You can open a browser such as Safari, log into http://aol.com, and read mail there (ie "webmail");
- You can install the AOL Desktop software, which is probably what you had on the PC. I don't tend to recommend this, as there's usually no need to install extra software, and I've found it very sluggish on a Mac. However, for people who are very used to it and dont want to change, the option is there;
- You can read AOL email in the Apple Mail application.
If you have added your AOL to Apple Mail, your mailboxes/folders should be available to you under a heading called "AOL" (you may have named your account differently). The mailboxes are on the left side - as mentioned above, you can hide and show the mailbox panel. (There's a "Show" button on the top left to reveal the mailboxes, which changes to "Hide" when you click it. If you already see "Hide", then you're fine.)
The server mailbox heading will be at the bottom of the mailbox panel on the bottom left. If you move your cursor over it, and you see the word "Show" appear, click that word. That will reveal the mailboxes within that server account.
In the example above, my server mail account is called "Google", but the principle is the same. Clicking "Show" will reveal all the mail folders held on the server. The same thing should work for your AOL account.
Hope that helps.
Matt