Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

When I select "Preferences" on the Menu Bar, nothing happens. This is only on my wife's account. On my account, I can adust preferences at will, but it's not an option when I flip to my wife's side.

I'm trying to convert her POP e-mail to IMAP and migrate her to Gmail.

Since I'm hardly ever on under her login and she's not one to tinker with preferences once set up, I have no idea how long this has been the case. It could've been a problem since Panther for all I know.

Setup: 1.8 GHz G5 iMac .. 1.5 GB RAM .. 10.5.2 w/2 accounts

What gives?

I'd start by deleting the caches and .plist.

No luck there.

I deleted Mail's cache and .plist files on my wife's side. I've rebooted. I've shut down and restarted... Still, nothing. The Preferences box in Mail just doesn't show up.

Is there any other way I can get her approximately 2,000 messages which are in an ISP POP account in Mail moved to her Gmail IMAP account?

This should've been a 30 minute project.

Did she install any third-party Mail-plug-ins? Check <herhome>/Library/Mail/Bundles. If you find something remove it, restart Mail and see what happens.

If you open /Applications/Utilities/Console.app does it show a message when you try to open the preferences? If so, what does it say?

Nothing there.

5/8/08 7:41:08 AM Mail[817] couldn't create partial directory path /Users/hername/Downloads
5/8/08 7:41:08 AM Mail[817] Path (null) given to -[NSWorkspace iconForFile:] is not a full path.
5/8/08 7:41:08 AM Mail[817] *** Assertion failure in -[NSMenuItem setTitle:], /SourceCache/AppKit/AppKit-949.27/Menus.subproj/NSMenuItem.m:743
5/8/08 7:41:08 AM Mail[817] couldn't create partial directory path /Users/hername/Downloads
5/8/08 7:41:08 AM Mail[817] Path (null) given to -[NSWorkspace iconForFile:] is not a full path.
5/8/08 7:41:08 AM Mail[817] *** Assertion failure in -[NSMenuItem setTitle:], /SourceCache/AppKit/AppKit-949.27/Menus.subproj/NSMenuItem.m:743
5/8/08 7:41:08 AM Mail[817] Invalid parameter not satisfying: aString != nil
Stack Trace: (
(
2518474484,
2446718828,
2518474244,
2465648100,
2470326908,
882912,
2471900272,
2471833984,
880432,
2471150524,
2471787196,
2471786476,
2471661484,
2435264364,
2435260676,
2435379428,
2435600340,
2435758140,
2435757864,
2435613928,
2435612412,
2470948332,
2470381656,
2470378888,
2470353476,
2470159432,
993392
))

If anyone here knows what that means... Wow.

Does she have a "Downloads" folder in her home folder? If not, try creating one.

If that's not it quit all internet applications like Safari and Mail and try trashing ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.internetconfigpriv.plist and ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.internetconfig.plist.

I don't know what that output means unfortunately.

That worked, friend. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Ug, I would not recommend using IMAP with Gmail.

And why not?

I've been doing just that since I got my iPhone on launch day 11 months ago and my mail experience has never been better. The only thing I ask is for a true Gmail.app for iPhone once the App Store opens.