Edited by author 10-24-2003 07:21 PM
stefanseiz has a *really* good point: "I also really don't like mail.app's combining INBOXES for all your accounts."

After installing Panther, I also took the opportunity to switch my POP mail account over to using IMAP (which my host now supports). Anyway, to do this, you can't just change an old POP account (even though all the other settings are the same). You have to create a new IMPA account, then delete the old POP account. But if you delete a mail account in Mail.app, it deletes all of the mail in the In box that is associated with that account. (How do you know which messages in your Inbox are associated with that account, and which are from some other account? Well, unless you've developed some clever marking scheme, you don't.) This is the craziest and least intuitive behavior I have encountered in Mail.app. Why should deleting info about an account (which would generally signify, for example, simply that I no longer want to use this email account) result in all of the messages for the account (that haven't already been put in other folders) being destroyed?

So the moral is: Don't delete an account you've created until you've made sure you've backed up the Inbox somehow, or otherwise made sure you can live without anything that's in it.

Also, a question: Anyone have any idea how to go about trying to recover a deleted Inbox? The POP account's folder (and the inbox.mbox file within it), inside Library/Mail/ simply disappeared (not simply put in the trash, but apparently deleted). I'm assuming I've just lost 10+ megs of mail for good, but if anyone has ideas, I'm open to them.