Preseving Mail for Account Recreation
Email on any operating system is a great tool, but sometimes for no apparent reason it just stops working. Settings can become corrupt and one of the more successful ways of "re-booting" your email is to recreate the email account by deleting and re-adding your account settings.
Normally deleting the Mail connection settings in Apple Mail will delete all your emails as well. Luckily, Apple has provided a feature that allows you to backup any emails that you have already downloaded so you can safely delete and re-create your mail acccount without losing any email.
1. Mail Main Window
Here you can see part of the Apple Mail inbox window. Normally it would be filled with email, but for our purposes we'll just imagine it's full of important emails from important friends.
In order to preserve or "back-up" email you need to create a new mailbox in your current mail account. This can be done by going to the Mailbox menu and clicking on "New Mailbox...".
2. New Mailbox
The following screen should pop up. Ensure that the location is "On My Mac" as per the image above and type in a name for the new mailbox (can be anything you fancy.) Click ok.
This will create the new mailbox as below.
3. Backing up your emails
Now grab all the email from the your usual inbox and drag it to the Mailbox/folder. You can do this by clicking in to your inbox and pressing the Apple key and "A" at the same time, then manually drag the highlighted items to your new mailbox folder.
This will keep all the emails in your inbox safe if you need to delete your account. You can also back-up any other emails you need such as your sent items by creating another new mailbox and dragging those emails across as above.
4. Deleting current account settings
You can now delete the connection by going to menu bar and selecting Mail, Preferences, Accounts and highlight the account. Clicking on the "-" (that's minus) button down the bottom will delete the account. When the warning comes up about removing the account select OK.
You can now recreate the account as per normal (for help, see article on "Setting up an Apple Mail Account"). Once your account has been recreated and it is working again, drag your emails back into the Inbox (if you saved your sent items you can drag those back to your new Sent Items folder).
Please note: If you drag mail back into the Inbox and you need to recreate the settings/account again, you will need to repeat steps 2 and 3 again.
