When I started a domain the mail server there was POP only. Eventually it was upgraded to IMAP and I made a new account in Apple’s Mail app with the IMAP details. I disabled the POP account in Mail.
I tried to delete the old disabled POP account today, but got all sorts of warnings from Mail that all it’s messages and Mailboxes would be deleted. I have archives of old mails going back years stored on iCloud, and don’t want to lose them. Given that Mail will still have an account with the same e-mail address (just with IMAP server settings) I think it will be safe to delete the old account now. Am I right?
I don’t know the answer to your question, but my advice is to save the mailbox before taking any drastic action. You can export it to .mbox format within the Mail app.
That’s the thing, because it is the same address there are no specific mailboxes associated with the POP version of my e-mail address. I have used MailSteward to make an archive of all my mail, so it should be safe to experiment.
I’m not 100% sure what you mean, @drmoss_ca . You’ve mentioned setting up a domain, which sounds like something outside Apple. You’ve also mentioned POP mail but getting warnings that mail would be deleted and you have lots of mail stored on iCloud.
As a fellow POP & IMAP email user for decades, not an expert on protocols or anything iCloud, I would just ask/offer the following (experts please correct me if astray) in the hope it helps somehow.
if you have your own domain, and have handled POP and IMAP email over the years in Apple Mail, then I am not clear what the connection with iCloud would be. I think that’s only for Apple-provided email service
As I understand it, POP mail downloads to your computer when you access it, and depending on your settings, a copy remains or doesn’t remain on the server. If you try in Apple Mail Settings to delete the account, then there is a fair chance Mail would interpret that as wanting to delete all the actual email, not just the account settings, hence warnings
If you want to delete just the entry in Mail Settings out of a good sense of order, house cleaning sort of thing, then yes, I would do all the backup options possible, if the old email is important to keep. Export per @bb1, do your Mail Steward activities, multiple backups etc and do a careful removal of the account and be ready to do the steps to recover.
FWIW, I have old account settings in Mail too, I just leave them there deactivated, they probably don’t take up much space or internet traffic. A tad disorderly yes but fairly well hidden in Settings .
I can take a received message from any mail account and store it in my archives on iCloud. From the mail server on my own domain, a Yahoo! account and a GMail account, as well as my iCloud account, it accepts and stores them all. This is actually very useful. I keep a Sent folder and a Received folder for each year, going back to 1998. I only keep received messages of importance, not all of them. The whole lot only uses ~5GB.
It was only because of trying out MailSteward that I wondered about deleting the POP version of my domain’s mail account: MailSteward ignores the fact the account is disabled in Mail’s preferences, and treats it as an extra account to be archived.
No answer but I ran into a similar situation when my previous ISP stopped being an ISP and I switched to Time-Warner Cable (Spectrum). I wanted to delete my old email accounts with my previous ISP but got the same warning you did. I assumed it meant that along with the connection info, all associated messages would also be deleted. So I left the accounts untouched, although deactivated.
Folders that belong to the POP account (e.g. Inbox, Sent)
Folders that belong to the IMAP account (e.g. Inbox, Sent, and whatever other folders you’re synching to server folders)
Folders that are local. On a Mac, these are grouped under “On My Mac”
When you delete the account from Mail, you will lose all the folders in the first group: folders that are part of the POP account. You won’t lose anything in the other groups.
Some of the messages that arrived to my address, came via the POP account, and more recently via the IMAP account, but all to the same address. I’m asking whether Mail might delete the older ones that came via POP, even though they are to the same address as a current, enabled, IMAP version of that address, or does Mail have no record of how they arrived? The inbox for both accounts is set to All Inboxes, and all the old POP messages have been moved since to my archived folders on iCloud.
It doesn’t matter what they were initially addressed to. Only thing that matters is where they are stored. If they are stored only in a mail folder within the POP account, you will lose them. If you in the past moved them into a mail folder within an IMAP account or to a folder in the On My Mac category, they won’t be affected and will remain right there. That holds regardless of what their TO field says or which account was originally used to download them. Hope that makes it clear.
You can set up a local Mailbox on your Mac (on-my-Mac, as mentioned by Simon) and copy/move your POP emails to that new Mailbox. I routinely archive my main mailboxes (eg @iCloud.comiCloud.com) in this way to manage the number of emails floating in the cloud (i.e. appearing on iPhone). Archiving by year makes locating old emails on the Mac easier.
The difficulty is that there are no separate mailboxes for the POP account, as the IMAP account inherited them. Fortunately I file e-mails away if they are to be kept so they have moved to archive folders on iCloud (and mirrored ‘on my Mac’), so that should keep them safe from being deleted. Anything that’s in my Inbox right now is definitely post-IMAP.
Are there email archiving softwares other than MailSteward that TBTers can recommend?
I tried it some while ago and found it too complicated for me at the time but if it’s far and away the best I’ll look again knowing I need to spend some time on it.
It would be nice to have email from older Macs saved in a way that doesn’t require the Mail app, I think that one makes its own database, which might then just be readable by other database softwares.
It depends on exactly what you want to do with the archived mail. For example, are you looking to maintain a constantly updated archive of all emails, a filtered archive, or snapshots of emails? How important is it to have searchable archives presented in an interface that resembles a mail client versus simply having an independent backup of email messages? Keep in mind that many email services allow downloading of email in text-based MBOX files or as individual messages.
I looked at MailSteward and Mail Archiver X years ago and settled on the latter, though I don’t remember why. I’m sure either will be fine for most archiving tasks. You also can archive emails using programs like EagleFiler and DevonThink. Note that Mail Archiver X, DevonThink, and EagleFiler offer discounts to TidBITS members.
It’s a big topic, and the answers come down to what you truly require and how you plan to access the archives. In addition to Mail Archiver X, I also like to take snapshots of my Thunderbird profile from time to time, since Thunderbird stores emails in MBOX format, which basically is the most universal format for importing into other mail apps.
I suggest starting another topic if you want to explore it further.
With respect to the original topic, I started to write a response that tries to clarify @drmoss_ca’s issues by going into some technical detail about what happens on the server and in the client when managing mail via POP and IMAP. It ended up being pretty long before even getting to the client side of things. I’ll take a stab at the client side, but I’m ambivalent about posting something so long and possibly pedantic.
Thanks for that @josehill , you’re exactly right, it is a much bigger topic than I thought!
I suppose I’m just looking for a way to save it, like a file cabinet drawer with paper correspondence, in case I ever need to look for something old, which is rare. When I do search email, it is typically for emails within say the last 6 months for an unclosed issue.
And I’d like the mail to be available with threads intact, not necessarily with attachments, and viewable for some years to come, ie not that I use a tool that gets decapitated by an OS update.
Good tip about Thunderbird, I haven’t used it for many years on my Macs but am starting to on a Linux laptop.
I’m not sure if this is a new limitation, but I just found out that the Mail search feature defaults to “All Inboxes” which does not include On-my-Mac mailboxes. If I click on one of these mailboxes in the sidebar if does show emails matching the search criteria but this is a little tedious. There doesn’t seem to be a way to simultaneously search all On-my-Mac mailboxes.
Good Grief, thanks for pointing that out, @mpainesyd , I hadn’t noticed it but right you are. I was wondering why searches were less successful lately. Need to look at the left hand column and elsewhere to see what is actually being searched…
I found an unusual word in an email in one of the On-My-Mac iCloud subfolders, searched for it in the Search field, and sure enough only All Inboxes was searched. Additionally, I selected the iCloud On-My-Mac folder and even that search failed to find the email. Only when I clicked on the subfolder where I knew it was, did it find it. Ack! need to look into this. IIRC search used to be better, and find Mail anywhere in the app.
I’ll update this if I find an answer.
[Edited to add: hm this is odd. I looked in all the Settings and found nothing to change this. I opened Mail Help in Tips app, started reading about searching in the Check your email section. There, it says
If there are no results in the current mailbox, click “Search all mailboxes” below the search field.
So I went back to Mail, did some other emailing, and entered the Search field again with that word, expecting the scope to be All Inboxes and to change it per the Help instructions, but it was this:
.