Mail.app’s disappearing POP mail trick
David Buxton at Reliably Broken has written 
a good explanation of the way Apple Mail treats email in POP and IMAP accounts, contrasting it (at the end) with the way Entourage handles each protocol.
As he notes:
Now when you go to remove an IMAP account Mail.app deletes all the local mailboxes for that IMAP account. This is not a problem, after all those local mailboxes are simple caches; the only reason the client keeps a copy is as a performance optimisation (as noted above).
Now when you remove a POP account Mail.app deletes all messages sent or received via that account, even though there will be no copy of those messages on the server (especially true for sent messages).
Not paying attention to this often has tragic results, as you can read in “The Mail POP Disaster: When it’s gone, it’s gone” and in Apple’s Mail Discussions (passim).
David dislikes this behaviour for POP accounts. He concludes: “This is not useful or intuitive – it is a bad design.” And he is not alone, by any means.
What do you think?
Not normally a huge Apple fan-boi, I actually side with the company on this one.
First, Apple gives you a big, fat warning when you attempt to delete a POP account, telling you quite plainly what will happen next — that this action will delete the settings, mailboxes and messages associated with that account:
Secondly, this behaviour makes sense. When you think of “an email account”, do you think of just the settings, or the mailboxes and email in that account as well? When users want to delete an account, Apple is right to take them at their word, and to delete everything.
Or to put it another way, to what extent are companies like Apple obliged to protect users from themselves? Some of my friends in User Support have strong (maximised) views on this, but may not be completely disinterested.
I might be wrong. I am open to persuasion. It just looks to me like Apple is getting panned for designing a process that actually does what the user wants.
Of course, the real moral of the story is not about design. It is backup, backup, backup!
It’s not Apple’s fault that so few people make them. I remember being appalled to learn during the 2006 WWDC Keynote that “only about four percent of users are utilizing automated software for backing up important files — only a quarter of users back up in any way whatsoever on a regular basis.” (Thanks to MacWorld for a transcript of the event)
Since Leopard, there’s no reason (apart from the performance hit and a few small annoyances) why people aren’t running Time Machine. Or one of the many other excellent backup solutions.
Just make sure that you are backing up up all the Mail files you should be.
Similar Posts:
- Mail POP disaster: When it’s gone, it’s gone
- Keyboard shortcut for mailbox info
- Backing up and restoring mailboxes in Mail 2.0
- Recovering deleted messages in Mail 2.0
- Importing emlx messages into Apple Mail 2.0
Tags: Apple Mail, backups, bad design, imap, mail.app, POP, timemachine
July 8th, 2010 at 12:07 am
As a Macintosh Systems Admin, I have to disagree with you, but only slightly. I feel that while the warning is right there to see, there should be another choice in the dialog box. That third choice should be, create an archive. This way there would be one button to click, that moved the messages from the Inbox, and Sent folders of the POP account in question into a set of folders.
There are many times that a POP account might need to be deleted, but the messages kept. I know how to do this, but many people don’t.
July 8th, 2010 at 12:26 am
I agree with you that “it’s not Apple’s fault” and that anyone who does the minimal backing up (that it’s even difficult these days not to do) will not experience any problems from lost email.
But Apple is not Microsoft. Apple makes better products by knowing how people operate better than those people know themselves. They should find a way actually to prevent people from making the mistake of losing their archived emails.
July 8th, 2010 at 12:29 am
Do you think there would be any value in putting a help button or “What does this mean for me?” sort of link in the account removal dialog? An explanation might offer some insight to users not knowing the difference between POP and IMAP. The fact that the message is the same for all accounts doesn’t help users who don’t know whether any of their messages are on a server somewhere.
I would support a revision here, at least in language; I agree that the current behavior is sensible.
July 8th, 2010 at 12:54 am
I disagree, and I think I have a good line of reasoning.
The problem of course is that IMAP and POP are so fundamentally different. But in the case of POP accounts, it is fundamental that the messages are not the account. For me, in the POP way of doing things, an “Account” is just the settings, not the messages.
Once an email is on your machine, it no longer has any real relationship with the account. It may be organized that way on your machine, but it’s a convenience in the POP universe. The trick is that messages stored outside the “Mailboxes” structure are NOT removed (afaik). So the workaround is really simple – move everything to another folder – but there are lots of times when I may want to remove an account (the settings required to gather email from a server locally to my computer) but that should have nothing to do with the messages.
That is not the case in IMAP, where the entire “Mailboxes” structure is pretty much (some exceptions are possible, and actually are on by default) simply a reflection of what is on the server.
July 8th, 2010 at 12:54 am
You are all moving in the direction of “a third way” — adding another option — something that had never occurred to me.
It’s just as well that I am not in UI design!
July 8th, 2010 at 12:59 am
I’ve been bitten by this problem before. I think Apple could do a better job.
For one thing, the dialog you show violates good UI in that the buttons show “cancel/OK” instead of action verbs like “delete”
I also think that adding a third choice (or second step) to delete the account but archive the mail would be a helpful backstop on users acting hastily and without reading the dialog as closely as they should.
Yes, we should all have backups, but destructive processes shouldn’t be designed on the assumption that you have that backup and can restore from there. For that matter, I do have backups (now), but it would just be more convenient for me to be able to delete an account while archiving all the traffic in one step.
July 8th, 2010 at 1:05 am
Perhaps some better definition of POP and IMAP for the user would be an improvement. I agree that POP by nature means that you pick up your mail, take it home, and that’s where it solely resides until you file it or trash it. Hence, “Post Office” Protocol. Whereas, IMAP maintains all your mail on a likely distant server, hence “Intertet Mail” Access Protocol.
These definitions aren’t present for unknowing users, whom I think may be in a majority. Is a little semantic assistance not worth Apple’s while?
July 8th, 2010 at 1:47 am
People are still surprised when surprising things like this happen with POP accounts? Really?
I’ve been using IMAP for over a decade now specifically to avoid having to deal with nonsense like this. While the Apple Mail POP behavior in this case is perfectly clear & acceptable to me, at the same time I can see where it would surprise people. With IMAP, there are far fewer surprises — your mail is always on the server, and locally you only ever have a cached version of it. You can switch clients or switch computers, no problem.
Problems with POP fall squarely under the “doctor! doctor! it hurts when I do this!” category as far as I’m concerned.
July 8th, 2010 at 2:34 am
Presumably if you’re deleting an account you’re replacing it with a new one, no? So add the new one first and drag the messages you want to save to it. Problem solved.
July 8th, 2010 at 4:38 am
I haven’t used POP in years, so I didn’t know about this, but I do think it’s fundamentally broken and Apple should fix it. The basic model of POP is that it functions only as a delivery method. Once the messages reach your computer, they are local messages and should be treated as such.
This is a recipe for massive and destructive data loss. Yes, users should protect against data loss by backup, but that doesn’t mean Apple should be laying mines for them.
July 8th, 2010 at 4:44 am
By the way…
I think this depends entirely on which model you are used to. For users that have only ever had POP accounts, and have never gotten used to the idea that their mail “lives” on the server, I think it really is going to be the former. Their e-mail is on their computer. The account is how they get new mail. Ben is right to mention the “post office” analogy of POP — if you have a PO box, and you shut it down, do you expect Postal Service employees to come into your house and shred your old mail?
July 9th, 2010 at 4:53 am
Backup isn’t the point. The point is that by deleting a POP account Mail.app deletes the email associated with it. It either should give users the opportunity to save those messages if they wish and not make a very large assumption. Yes, yes if you use Time Machine or another method you can recover the email but why should you have to? It is poor design.
I really wish there was a better email client for Mac than Mail.app. One that handled IMAP gracefully and whose filter function was able to handle something like “copy message to mailbox A and then move the message to mailbox B”. Or be able to automatically filter other IMAP mailboxes other than inbox for those of us using procmail to do some pre-sorting. Alas, Mail.app is the only thing going other than Thunderbird and Thunderbird has a crap UI.
July 9th, 2010 at 10:44 am
There are other email clients for Mac besides Mail and Thunderbird. They’re just not free.
July 11th, 2010 at 11:37 am
Thanks to all who took the trouble to post their views.
I am convinced by those who suggest the addition of another button to the dialog.
Users should be presented with two buttons — “Archive” or “Delete” — and be forced to make a choice in order to progress.
This seems very sensible, now that I think about it!
July 11th, 2010 at 8:23 pm
[...] Gaden over on Hawk Wings doesn’t agree that Mail.app’s behaviour regarding deleting POP accounts is [...]
July 11th, 2010 at 9:09 pm
I think an “archive” button would be useful but still doesn’t allow one to just keep the messages in the Inbox. Why should deleting a POP account imply that the messages should be archived?
July 12th, 2010 at 1:10 am
“I think an “archive” button would be useful but still doesn’t allow one to just keep the messages in the Inbox. Why should deleting a POP account imply that the messages should be archived?”
I don’t disagree. So the archive button, transfers the messages to a different place: On My Mac/Inbox.
July 13th, 2010 at 9:38 pm
Ben…I’ve looked. Being “not free” is not a deterrent for me but most of the field I’ve checked so far isn’t worth paying for. The closest I’ve found that I like is GyazMail but it has some glaring feature holes like handling HTML/RTF signatures (legally required full disclaimer where I work) and RTF editting (seems to default to plain text unless you are replying to an RTF or HTML mail).
You could argue that HTML and RTF have no place in email and I’d agree but for where I work it is the only choice.