Mail will not retrieve

Question

After some 15 months of using mail without problems, now when I try to collect mail, my activity viewer indicates that mail is going through all the motions of picking up mail and indicates that there is no mail available. If I go into mail2web I can pick up mail without problems. I have changed none of my mailserver settings and discussed this problem with my server techies who say it is a mac problem. I have tried rebooting but it makes no difference.Can anyone help please

Answer 1

You’re welcome.
I have no problem connecting to the internet via an external modem.
Glad to know. I didn’t say nor meant otherwise. Does the network interface used to connect to Internet appear at the top of the list in System Preferences > Network > Show: Network Port Configurations or not?
the mails show in the gear action window as not downloaded but ready for download.
Sometimes messages left on the server clog up the account there, or Mail chokes on a message it cannot download and that prevents it from downloading the rest as well. Solving this problem will probably require removing one or more messages from the server. What are your Preferences > Accounts > Advanced > Remove copy from server settings for this account?
You may tell Mail to remove from the server all the messages that have already been downloaded by means of Preferences > Accounts > Advanced > Remove now. Alternatively, you may use the Account Info window to remove specific messages from the server. And if the account allows web access, you may also remove messages from the server that way.
Try removing from the server messages that have already been downloaded and/or the first message not downloaded yet (i.e. the message that Mail appears to be choking on).
You may want to try to download those messages with another mail client such as Thunderbird first, to avoid losing them — and use Eudora Mailbox Cleaner to import them back into Mail afterwards if you wish.
There is something, however, that you may want to try after removing from the server messages that have already been downloaded, but before removing messages that haven’t been downloaded yet.
For POP accounts, Mail uses a file within the account folder to keep track of which messages have already been downloaded. Deleting that file causes Mail to treat everything still on the server as if new and try to download it again:
1. Quit Mail.
2. In the Finder, go to the ~/Library/Mail/POP-username@mailserver/ account folder.
3. Locate one or two files named MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded and move them to the Trash. Mail 1.x used MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded to keep track of which messages had already been downloaded. Mail 2.x uses MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded2 for the same purpose.
Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user’s home folder. That is, ~/Library is the Library folder within the user’s home folder, i.e. /Users/username/Library.