Removing a Mail Account

JusMe

This seems curious to me, and if someone can clarify, I'd appreciate it.

Like many people, I have several email accounts. I've decided to trash one of the ISPs and might as well trash the Account information in Mail.app

But, I get a warning that if I delete that account, "Removing an account in the Accounts pane of Mail preferences removes the account setup information from Mail and deletes all mailboxes and messages for the account that are saved on your computer."

Now, I'm happy about removing the account setup information, as I won't be using that account or checking for mail in it at all.

But before I go ahead and actually remove it, the "deletes all mailboxes and messages for the account that are saved on your computer" makes me very cautious.

Does that mean that emails I've received over several years in the past, will just disappear if I remove that account from the Mail preferences?

I'll be glad to remove the account, but sure don't want to lose all those messages.

be-jot

i'm guessing that's the case
which is kinda weird, but over the course of my apple experience i've found out that apple makes things "different"

flak

Yes, it'll delete your inbox, sentbox, drafts, junk, and trash for every email on that account. In the sidebar, if there is email stored on the server (if it's an IMAP account), it'll just remove your access to those boxes.

The best thing to do would be to make new folders for your inbox, sentbox, etc under On My Mac. From there, drag all of your emails from your ISP's mailboxes to those new folders. Delete the account from the Mail preferences, and double check to see that your email is still there - it should be.

Make sure that you've got a backup. If you're not using backup software, then right click on the folder ~/Library/Mail/ and make an archive - you can always decompress it and retrieve your mail from that, if there was an issue.

JusMe

That collection of emails isn't in the in/sent boxes, or others, but only distributed around different mailboxes in which I've collected emails from a number of different people. So, assuming those won't be lost as they're in different mailboxes, I'll archive my mail folder and make an archive just in case. That way I won't have to mess around with Time Machine.

I'll report what happens :-)


Later:
Okay, I made a copy of that folder and kept it on my desktop as "Mail copy" and then using BetterZip I made a .zip archive of it there, too.

Went to the Preferences in Mail, deleted the account with all its warnings.

Checked all the mail folders, and all those original emails were still there. So, I assume what it means by deleting all the mail, it really means on the server, and perhaps as a separate inbox, but not if those emails have been distributed around different cataloguing mailboxes.

Info is here if anyone has a similar problem and does a search.