After many years I’m getting ready to phase out of using my former local ISP’s mailbox services to send and receive email and switch to a more secure and reliable service. I’ve opted for Protonmail, which now has a Proton Bridge app that’s compatible with Apple Mail.
But there’s one old habit I don’t want to lose (however terribly old-fashioned), which is to save my archive of past msgs. on my laptop’s drive rather than rely on a cloud-based service. My old service retained a POP option, which made that easy, but I’m not sure how to make it work in IMAP, which is all Protonmail offers.
In the IMAP world, if I move older messages to a backup mailbox on my laptop and they’re no longer in my Apple Mail Inbox, can I delete them from the IMAP-based server without losing them? If not, is there another workaround to save older msgs. without maxing out my server usage? Would copying rather than moving the messages do the job? What about messages that I have automatically sent to other mailboxes using Apple Mail Rules?
Having relied on old fashioned POP service since time immemorial (1990s I suppose), I’m finding this terribly confusing. I hope someone here can help me figure it out. Thanks!
I think you can simply drag them from the Proton mailbox (in box, archive, whichever) to a mailbox on your Mac. When you move them, they will, in fact, delete from the server - to the server it looks like you deleted them.
It’s not all that confusing. In the IMAP world, your app will show server-side folders (one set for each server the app is configured to use) and local folders like “On My Mac” (which are on your device).
The server-side folders are “windows” to whatever the server has. Whenever you make a change, the change takes place on the server. And whenever the server changes, all clients connected to the server see the change.
The local folders are just that - local to your device. Those messages are not accessible from anywhere else.
So…
If you have a message in your IMAP server’s inbox and you move it to another folder on that IMAP server, it remains on the server. Any other device configured to see your account (e.g. Mac, phone, iPad, web interface) will see the change soon afterward.
If you have a message in your IMAP server’s inbox (or a folder), and you move it to a local folder, then your mail app will download it, store it on your computer, and then delete it from the server. Any other device will see the message disappear.
If you have a message in your IMAP server’s inbox (or a folder) and you copy it to a local folder, then your mail app will download it, store it on your computer and leave the server-side copy alone. They will not be linked, so deleting your local copy will not delete the server-side copy and vice-versa.
When you delete a message from an IMAP server’s folder, it may be deleted or it may be moved to a “Trash” folder on the server, depending on how your mail client is configured.
Thanks for asking this question! Here’s a practical example.
I used POP email way back when I just had one computer, there was nothing else to sync it to, and eventually I moved to IMAP, mostly Apple Mail.
When I started getting other computers and devices, it made sense to keep email on the server so I could access it anywhere but I worried about eventual storage costs and corruption or loss of data so eventually did what David C. is explaining, about once a month I move emails from the Favorites Inboxes to folders On My Mac for ‘archival’ storage, where they remain searchable and available. I also do a fair bit of backing up the Mac where I do this, as I, not email provider, am now responsible to avoid loss!
My lifestyle now doesn’t require email access across devices and places, so this works for me.
Using this technique I also stay within the iCloud 5GB free storage (Mail typically weighs in at < 500MB and I don’t use iCloud for much else).
One gotcha to be aware of is that any mail needed on other devices should be kept on the server as long as the need is there, and another would be to only move email to On My Mac on one computer. If you start to move and copy to On My Mac on multiple Macs, things could really get confusing.
Regarding the Rules, I haven’t used them for automatically ‘sending’ them, but I checked the options just now and both move and copy are there as is On My Mac as a destination so that might be a fine idea for your situation!
Consider reading Joe Kissell’s Take Control of Apple Mail ebook.
Related question(s) for transitioning from POP to IMAP…
For a Mac (still on Big Sur if that matters) with 4 POP accounts, all using Apple Mail and with many year’s worth of emails and a deep folder structure, what is the best/safest process for switching to IMAP?
Create a new IMAP account first for each POP account and verify it works for both send/receive? Would the relevant POP account need to be disabled first?
Will the new IMAP account detect the Mac’s local folder structure in Mail and recreate it on the server?
Do all the emails already on the Mac get copied to the server by default too? What about any attachments that are still associated with an email?
Safe to delete the POP accounts once the IMAP accounts are verified to work?
Anything else to be aware of? One of the 4 POP accounts would be a good candidate for a “test” account.
If it’s the same e-mail provider, this probably means just creating an IMAP account in your mail app.
I would disable your POP account configuration so your app won’t try to fetch mail that way, and then create the IMAP account. Once configured correctly, it should immediately show anything in the server-side mailbox folders.
Once you’re happy that this is working, don’t immediately delete your local POP account, because that may delete locally-stored messages. First move them all to some local folder not associated with any account. Then delete the account.
You don’t strictly need to disable the POP accounts, but you should, because whenever they try to sync with the server, they will probably download and delete the messages, making them vanish from the corresponding IMAP account configuration.
They shouldn’t. Your newly-created IMAP account shouldn’t have any relationship to other local accounts, including POP accounts configured for the same mailbox.
If you want to move messages to the server, you can probably do that from within your mail app. Attachments should move with the messages. But it won’t happen automatically.
Yes, but be aware of how your mail app handles POP mail folders. If deleting the account deletes all associated local folders, then you will want to move those messages elsewhere before deleting the account.
Many thanks to Doug and the 2 Davids for your thorough replies. The behavior you’re describing is what I’d hoped to be the case and now I can go ahead and test the new service with a lot more confidence than I had before.
I also was not previously aware that Mail Rules had both Move and Copy options, which is very helpful to know.
Likewise, thanks to David C. for addressing my questions. I was hoping to transition one of my accounts to IMAP over the weekend but wasn’t able to get to it. If I get it done soon I’ll reply again with how it went and any tips from what I learned.