Lost "All Inboxes" in Apple Mail -- any way to get it back?

[Thegreenman]

The solution I found that worked for me was, right click got to view drop down to hide side bar and click the box were back

 

[jzangaro]

ANOTHER OPTION: My problem was, after removing all my favorites and clicking the dropdown - "All Mailboxes" wasn't an option. It's not that it was greyed out - It wasn't there. I almost gave up - but LIGHTBULB: I remembered it appears when I search my mail -- and sure enough, I searched a random word and All Mailboxes appeared on left column, and I right clicked it to add to favorites.

 

[flipin]

Another example of why I love the MacRumors ersatz BBS. Critical info without a lot haughty behavior based on pints given by the Apple Community. Thanks for these quick fixes to a ridiculous problem

 

[Rodan52]

Sure is a common problem, my wife did this yesterday and came to me saying, "I'VE LOST MY ALL INBOXES FOLDER." I think it may have happened at a bad time for her. As I don't use Apple Mail myself I was as puzzled as she was but thanks to this great forum a quick search landed me in this thread and I was able to impress her by fixing it almost instantly. I did tell her I found the answer here, eventually.
So thanks everybody for your helpful advice.👍👌🙂

 

[macplaymates]

Thank you! That is just bad by design if you all have this issue. I would be ashamed as a developer that all my users have this issue already for such long time. But anyway, thanks!

absolutely. true, why would they hide the plus (+) absolutely terrible User interface design. Apple is really dumb sometimes. I've been using Mac OS since 1986 Mac 512K. The best OS design was under Jean-Louis Gassée.

 

[Tribeca]

Late to the thread, BUT FOUND A QUICK EASY SOLUTION.
If this was already mentioned, I apologize for reposting.

All I did was go to the "Search" field in Apple Mail and simply type in "All Mailboxes" and the search revealed the lost All Mailboxes folder in the sidebar! I dragged it down into my "Favorites" and now everything is back to normal.

Running Ventura v13.1 on Mac Studio M1

 

[Mookerchief]

I've encountered the same issue - losing my smart folder which shows all unread emails with no way to get it back. That pesky '+' button keeps disappearing. But I found another solution which might help others.

I did have some other smart mailboxes in place - such as 'Today'. A right click on the name brought up a contextual menu, and the options included 'duplicate' and 'edit'. So I duplicated it, renamed it, and edited it so it became my 'all unread' messages. I repeated that and created 'all inboxes' as well, which I order with the most recent and the unread messages at the top.

 

[Mookerchief]

Hold on... that technique above, duplicate and edit, does not work. The changes you make mess up the original. Use with caution.

 

[ccheatham]

Next to the "Favorites" header in the sidebar tap the + button. You'll see it as an option in the drop-down menu.

Thank you!

 

[2Charles]

It's a little bit too easy to accidentally remove All Inboxes from Favorites. All you have to do is click and drag it off the sidebar, and "poof" it disappears. I've seen it happen before and it can really torment the user. One time, I completely reset the Mail preferences before discovering the hidden Favorites > + button. Glad you all figured it out.

Think that is what I did - drag All Inboxes off the window. Gone. I went to Favorites > + and see all of the different mailboxes...BUT "All Inboxes" is grayed out and cannot be selected. Any idea what to do in this case?