Is there a way to completely reinstall my mail program?

Question

I'm having serious problems with my Mail program and am thinking that maybe if I just completely reinstall Mail on my MacBook Pro, that might help. How would I go about this? (And is there a way to do it without using those discs you get when you buy your computer? Because I lost those when our basement flooded during Hurricane Irene!)

Answer 1

Your problem is more likely because of something in your User, the Mail program is a global item, meaning many users can use the same program.
You can try a simple fix first.
Use the Finder > Go to open:
~/Library/Preferences
and drop the
com.apple.mail.plist
file into the Trash, reboot the machine and launch Mail, reset your preferences. See if that fixs your issue. (the plist file is automatically recreated)
To find out if it's really something in your user or the mail program itself, create/log into a another user and use the Mall program there, if issues still occur, it's the Mail program.
(If it's not in the Mail program, reinstalling it will make no difference.)
The Mail program is reinstalled from the 10.6 disks as bundled programs, or part of a "OS X overwrite" that replaces your current OS X and bundled programs with the older version on the 10.6 disk, you need to immediately Software update afterwards to get OS X and bundled programs current again.
To perform the OS X overwrite, hold c boot off the 10.6 installer disk and simply install OS X, then reboot normally and apply Software update to get current. The Mail program itself will be replaced.
Some third party programs that have kext files and other "hooks" into OS X may not function again after performing the OS X overwrite, you just need to reinstall these programs again from fresh sources and it will replace those hooks/kext files back into OS X.
Please backup your files to a external storage drive and mainatin two seperate hardware copies of your data off the machine at ALL times.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16276201#16276201