Let's say, that you are moving into the modern way of doing things - and want your mail collected by IMAP instead of POP. (Yes, I know ther are some of you who resist!)
A lot of customers are discovering that this is the way to go to avoid having to find their message amongst all the spam and flotsam on multiple devices... And more importantly see what was Sent in reply to that important email last week when you were in Honlulu and your partner replied on your behalf..
I accomplished this (on Mavericks on an iMac), but with a few provisos and heart-stopping moments.
The pop settings had been set to delete all mail on the server after a month, and there were two xtra accounts with history back about 3 years (2016 to 2013).
After checking the amount of mail left on the server and making sure I had the passwords correct (using webmail), I deleted the two accounts in Mail.
What I forgot to do was drag the contents into folders created under the On My Mac section.
I created the two new IMAP accounts (the trick here is to purposefully put a wrong password in - or else you will simply get a POP Yahoo account created).
So I resorted to Time Machine - which I knew had been backing up OK.
Two tricks I learned here - place your cursor in the Folder or Mailbox that you want to restore before pressing the Time Machine. Either restore an entire mailbox, or select individual mail within a box.
Allow all the items to load BEFORE pressing Command-A to select all though!
Then Restore and wait a good amount of time to allow the process to complete as there is no indication of its progress or success. In future I may open a terminal to see if there any encouraging logs coming through...
The most important trick is to close Mail, and re-open it, and you should see a new folder at the bottom of the list called Recovered Messages, and Recovered Messages-1 -2 -3 if you have tried it a few times like I did (These new folders not be visible if you have a lot of folders), and copy and paste the items back into the IMAP Inbox, (or perhaps just into an On My Mac folder if you prefer - in case the IMAP server deletes them as they are not on the server) - as reported in this excellent page here: http://pondini.org/TM/15m.html
Job done.
I accomplished this (on Mavericks on an iMac), but with a few provisos and heart-stopping moments.
The pop settings had been set to delete all mail on the server after a month, and there were two xtra accounts with history back about 3 years (2016 to 2013).
After checking the amount of mail left on the server and making sure I had the passwords correct (using webmail), I deleted the two accounts in Mail.
What I forgot to do was drag the contents into folders created under the On My Mac section.
I created the two new IMAP accounts (the trick here is to purposefully put a wrong password in - or else you will simply get a POP Yahoo account created).
So I resorted to Time Machine - which I knew had been backing up OK.
Two tricks I learned here - place your cursor in the Folder or Mailbox that you want to restore before pressing the Time Machine. Either restore an entire mailbox, or select individual mail within a box.
Allow all the items to load BEFORE pressing Command-A to select all though!
Then Restore and wait a good amount of time to allow the process to complete as there is no indication of its progress or success. In future I may open a terminal to see if there any encouraging logs coming through...
The most important trick is to close Mail, and re-open it, and you should see a new folder at the bottom of the list called Recovered Messages, and Recovered Messages-1 -2 -3 if you have tried it a few times like I did (These new folders not be visible if you have a lot of folders), and copy and paste the items back into the IMAP Inbox, (or perhaps just into an On My Mac folder if you prefer - in case the IMAP server deletes them as they are not on the server) - as reported in this excellent page here: http://pondini.org/TM/15m.html
Job done.
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