05-03-2009, 02:26 PM

Hi hope someone can help me figure this out. Just come over from PC to Mac, so I'm a newbie with the the mac OS.

I was setting up the email for my website/hosting (which went really smoothly on my new iMac), and had to make some changes to my wife's existing mail setup(MacBook). After much messing around with no resolution i decided to delete her email account and start again to make sure there were no typing errors just like i would do with MS XP/VISTA.

Much to my horror, ALL the emails she received to that account had been deleted.

Was i foolish to assume that deleting it would just delete the user account settings? Have the emails been lost for good? This seems a bit extreme and an illogical a process to delete ALL emails from that email account.

Is there anyway of finding where the emails are cached. She has time machine but it wasn't set up ergo nothing to recover data with.

As a newbie i must say I'm a tad disappointed with this kind of functionality

Cheers for any advice
Ricky

05-03-2009, 02:42 PM

Just looked at Mail help > Removing Mail accounts and the NOTE...

NOTE: Deleting a mailbox permanently deletes the mailbox and its contents, and cannot be undone. If you set up Time Machine to back up files, you can use it to recover previous versions of a deleted mailbox. Crap...RTFM

Also time machine wasn't setup yet... Surely the data wasn't lost completely?
With PC a registry restore could point to the data, i.e. the data is on the drive, the OS just doesn't know how to get to it!!

I really need this data as its communications from ALL my clients. ANY suggestions at all. Are there such things as "super mac users"? Is there a fix?

Feeling desperation now :s

05-03-2009, 03:04 PM

If you delete an account and you are using POP you will delete your messages. Do you use POP? If you used IMAP the messages would still be on the server. Did you not get a prompt when deleting the account that stated everything would be deleted? Why would you be disappointed from this type of "functionality?"

05-03-2009, 04:51 PM

Yes, Mail downloads messages from the server.