Mail 8.1 Completely Broken HELP

[Senor Cuete]

Yesterday I updated to OS X 10.10.1 and now Mail is completely broken. I can't send Mail out to the SMTP server of either account. I spent a lot of time looking at this. It looks like there's a problem with the accounts. I did this with Connection Doctor open and logging the attempts to connect. An obvious problem is that when I change the information in the accounts, such as the port, and close the preferences menu, Mail asks me to save changes. I hit OK but when I try to connect again, the changes have not been saved. Adding insult to injury, Mail forgot all of my mail folders and I had to restore the Mail folder in my user->Library to a version saved by Time Machine yesterday and rebuild Mail's folders to get all of my mail back. I spent about an hour with my ISP's support when Mail did this about a month ago and the only solution was to delete my accounts, recreate them and get my Mail folders back using Time Machine. If I knew where the accounts are stored I could restore them with Time Machine and maybe this would fix this more easily than re-creating them.

Is anyone else having this nightmare? Does anyone know where the accounts are stored (in some folder in my user->Library)?

 

[Senor Cuete]

BAD "feature"

It seems that with Mail 8 Apple added an option to "Automatically detect and maintain account settings” in the advanced panel for accounts and in the account’s Edit SMTP servers menu. 10.10.1 seems to check these boxes. When you try to fool around with your settings, these options override what you are trying to do so you can’t fix the problem. Unchecking these boxes in both places for each account seems to fix the problem.

One has to wonder what Apple was thinking when they added this “feature” to the Mail program. How would they know how your account should be setup?