Home Forums Networks & Cross-Platform Networking cannot receive apple mail

OS10.6.8 imac 8Gb ram. Yesterday I cleaned up a lot of my emails and this morning, a tilde appeared next to my 2 email addresses. I tried to remove them until I finally just clicked on one of them and they disappeared. But now I cannot receive mail but I did send one to myself and received it okay. Does anyone know how to resolve my problem? jaybass.

Clarifications, please. A tilde next to the In Box name (e-mail address) in the sidebar of Apple Mail? Where are you seeing this tilde?

Check your "Accounts" settings in Mail Preferences?

probably seeing the "offline" zigzag beside the inbox.

mouse over the zigzag and click to "take all accounts online" and see if that helps.

quit and relaunch mai and repeat if not.

if it still goes back to offline, try running the connection doctor in the menubar under the Window menu, tell us what that reports.

Thanks Ira,
The tilde was to the right side of both my email addresses and also the trash icon. Clicking one of those tildes made them disappear. I checked my accounts in mail prefs and everything seemed fine. I phoned my ISP and changed my password and he then sent me an email which I received okay. I then opened my apple mail and there were 6 emails waiting. I don't know why it happened but I'm happy it's straightened out. Jaybass

I think perhaps you are right about "offline" zigzag because I just clicked the "take the accounts offline" and that zigzag sign appeared. Is that to remind you about being offline? Thanks for your reply. jaybass

yep. it's not just to tell you when YOU turn it offline, it should appear there anytime there's a problem checking mail for an account that is NOT disabled in account preferences. Taking it online doesn't necessarily "stick" though. Taking it online will just make it try to check again later. If it fails again, it will go offline and zigzag it again. So it's best to do a Get Mail after enabling something, to make sure it's good.

Virtual 1, Thanks for that info...something I've never come across before.
jaybass

You may be one of the very few this has not happened to before. Count yourself fortunate.

this was a problem I ran into fairly often in the past. The zigzag is pretty subtle and not terribly obvious to its meaning. Unless you think to mouse-over it there's no good indicator of what it is or why it's there, and no further explanations elsewhere for why you're not receiving new mail. (let alone making suggestions for how to FIX the problem)