Mails are lost after modifying account

[oyalhi]

Hi, my boss had a POP account configured on its computer. Then we changed email providers from something to googleapps.

Instead of creating a new POP account (enabled in google), I chose to open the existing account properties and modified its properties (pop & smtp servers etc).

As soon as I closed the dialog, the old emails are hidden (worse deleted!). New emails are coming fine; however, where did the old files go?

Thanks in advance for any input.

p.s. I showed hidden files and looked under /Library/Mail but could not see the old emails, just the new account:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

 

[James_C]

Unfortunately using the same account and changing the properties basically has reset the account. Any old emails that existed on the computer will have been removed, when the new account was synced. With IMAP the database on the server is the master account and all connected computers will sync to that.

Your ability to recover the old POP emails will depend if the emails where kept on the server or not. In Mail there is a preference checkbox to keep emails on the server, although I think by default it is set to off (but not sure as it is a while since I used a POP email account). Create a new account with the old POP server details and see if the old emails are still there.

If the emails are still missing then hopefully you had a backup before you started to mess with the Mail settings, if not then your only hope is to use a data recovery service to try and rebuild the old email database.

 

[oyalhi]

There is no backup, and all the mail from the pop server is already gone.
It's really interesting that Mail does not even give a warning, or better yet save the old mail account somewhere and create the new one. Really sucks.

Thank you for the reply.