I’m using Mac mail, and want to start over with a fresh mailbox. Specifically, I want to change my primary account (NOT .mac, rather an account for my personal website hosted with a large hosting company) from POP to IMAP.
To the best of my knowledge, I need to archive my existing mailbox, then start over with a new one. Except then, it’s very difficult to search through my previous box without expanding the archive.
So… is there any way to save my existing mailbox and just move it off somewhere that it’s not accessed by the mail application unless I need it? Like Quicken… the software can open various data files, and I have old files that I’ve set aside and haven’t used, but which I can easily open for tax purposes and they’re ready to go.
Any way to move current mailbox to a separate file that just sits there until I actively access it? Again, without the archiving that compresses everything and therefore makes it harder to access/search later.
Seems to me that Mrs. R and I did this just the other day, to transfer mail files from her old Mac to her new one. Try Googling “Mac mail transfer folders”. I think there’s an Export command in one of the pull-down menus that does the trick.
You should be able to just create a new account in Mail using IMAP.
Open up the POP account’s preferences, click the Advanced tab, then uncheck the “Include when automatically checking for new mail” and “Remove copy from server” options.
Once the new IMAP account is working, you should be able to drag messages from the old account, or just leave them there and keep the new account neat and tidy.
Ugh. Didn’t even occur to me to simply “disable” the existing mailbox and create a new one with same settings, just changed to imap. Solved everything, thanks!
Follow-up question that just occurred to me:
Assume the following: I use the Mail application that comes with Mactintosh OS X. I have an IMAP account.
I can create separate folders to store mail messages.
When I drag a message from the inbox of my IMAP account to the separate folder, will the e-mail message be deleted from the inbox on the IMAP server? The drawback on IMAP accounts, from my point of view, is that all the e-mail is kept on the server and you might run into a mailbox size limit on the server. Which is why I use POP all the time.
(By the way I assume that the same question can apply to any other mail program, like Eudora or Thunderbird)
I will try it at home, but I’m wondering if anyone here already knows the answer.
in answer to your question, you can delete messages from an IMAP server, either automatically or manually. The process is similar to that in a modern POP server.
one thing that confused me about the OP is the definition of mailbox. In Apple Mail, a “mailbox” is the term used for a set of messages. Think of it as a folder or directory (it is a single file with a .mbox extension but think of it as a directory of files). You can have as many mailboxes as you want and put messages from anywhere in any mailbox. I think the OP was thinking of an “account”. That is a series of instructions to log on to a mail server somewhere and download messages. Once you have the messages on your computer you can put them anywhere including the trash (which is a .mbox file just like any other mailbox).
Yes, I realize that you can delete messages, I was just wondering what happened if, in my mail client, I moved an e-mail message from the IMAP inbox to a separate folder (named mailbox in Apple Mail). Would this cause it to be deleted from the IMAP server? I would imagine so, but I forgot to check last night.
