Mail POP disaster: When it’s gone, it’s gone
Thursday, August 24th, 2006My RSS reader NetNewsWire 
served up a tragic Apple Mail story today.
A poster on the macOSXHints forums had a very bad day :
So I was having trouble with one of my POP3 accounts in Mail.app. It was locking up when receiving the last message. It’s safe to say that this problem is already fixed.
In the process of fixing it I decided to remove the account and re-add it (a common solution in MS Outlook). When I deleted the account I did not realize that it also deletes the folder with all your messages in it with out noticing me! So I lost all of my email in that folder (stupid me didn’t have a backup of that box). Is there anyway to get it back? I tried using Data Rescue X but it pretty much just recovered files that were already there (unless I am using it wrong).
Please help! Thank you!
The sad thing is that there is no help. When you delete a POP account in Mail.app, it doesn’t just delete the settings. It deletes the lot. Gone.
Of course, it’s not helpful after the fact to point out that Mail warns you first:
Or that you should have a backup.
Or that MS Outlook is an unreliable guide for life as a whole.
Or that IMAP is an email protocol with many advantages.
Still, it’s not after the fact for most readers here (yet).
Tags: Apple Mail, backup, data loss, disaster, imap, mail.app, POP
A poster in the Apple Mail.app discussions 
MailTunes is a free-standing app that provides you with a dynamically changing signature for your emails. By default it contains info about the track currently playing in iTunes, but it can be configured to report uptime or anything else you know how to ring out of its shell script. 