Reset Apple Mail POP Email Account

[rardark]

Hello,
I have a Macbook Pro with a POP email account in Apple Mail. May I ask if the received messages can still be kept in Apple Mail after I remove the POP email account? Thanks.

 

[tehabe]

I haven't used a POP3 account for a long time but you should be able to move all emails to a local folder (On My Mac), the emails are already locally stored.

 

[tragicwinding]

When you remove a POP email account from the Apple Mail app, the account's email messages are removed from your Mac. However, copies of these messages will remain on the mail server and can still be accessed through webmail or other email clients.

If there are messages that you want to keep, you should move or copy them to a mailbox stored on your Mac before removing the account. This ensures that these emails will still be accessible even after the account is removed. You can do this by creating a mailbox in the "On My Mac" section in the Mail sidebar and moving your emails there.

For a more detailed guide on how to do this, you can check out this Apple Support page.

 

[ignatius345]

When you remove a POP email account from the Apple Mail app, the account's email messages are removed from your Mac. However, copies of these messages will remain on the mail server and can still be accessed through webmail or other email clients.

I don't think this is accurate. What you're describing sounds a lot more like how IMAP works: it mirrors what's on the email server and downloads copies. What's stored on the Mac is also stored on the server, so there are no issues if you log in with multiple devices.

POP, on the other hand, fetches emails from the server and (if I'm remembering correctly) either deletes them from the server or leaves the originals there, depending on how the email client is configured. POP is an older standard that dates back to the days when an end user wasn't likely to have much server-side storage, so it was designed to just pass along email to its end storage destination of the user's local hard drive.

In any case, the safest course of action is -- as you say -- to copy all emails to an On My Mac folder.

 

[VineRider]

Good explanation of the difference between POP and IMAP

What is the difference between POP and IMAP? - Microsoft Support

support.microsoft.com