Mac Mail problem, lost my messages

[Paddy]

QUOTE

But who bothers to back up emails?

I do. And I hope you now will as well.

My email is FULL of vital info - I've even referred to emails I received years ago at times.

There is no limit to the number of accounts you have in Mail as far as I know. I've had 6 or 8 at times, since I sometimes have test accounts for clients etc. No problems. And if they're all on one Mac, which I HOPE you're backing up regularly using Time Machine or SuperDuper, then you probably will never face the situation of having lost all your emails again.

[jcarter]

Hi Paddy,
Yes I save all the important emails as pdfs. I really dont have that many important ones, mostly family and class stuff.
Though on this new Mac, I will see how to save them in groups. I trash a lot, ones from LLBean and that stuff, ads, but I dont trash the family stuff, and Ive been able to go back and find the name of a new child or puppy by just having them saved. Until now, I never had a problem.

So I think I shall just add this capecod.net one to my new account here.  As Earthlink webmail is not working, I can send but not receive.
So its pretty worthless. Gmail is great.
I love my gmail account.

Will take your advice and add capecod.net to this Mac sometime next week. Yeah, its nice to have one email address that gives your location.
Right now, everything is working well, went thru my address book and all my people have the new address, and some had it before too.
Will look into the new account soon, it would bring all communications into this Mac, and thats really not what I want, I wanted to continue to use the soccer ball Mac for communication and this one to do my class work on.
Oh, well, this one is really fast and does everything all at once, so it will do everything I want.
Jane

[jcarter]

FIXED!
My webhost guy got my jane(at)jcarter.net all fixed this morning. And I can now read all my old messages, they didnt actually go away, they were still on the server.
Whew, got some mail from my cousins.

Now I have my more important account the jcarter(at)capecod.net one to get around to adding it to my Mac Mail.
I am checking it on Earthlink webmail now.
I will tackle this later, as everything is working now.

If it aint broke,,,,,,
Jane

[Xairbusdriver]

So...it actually had nothing to do with Mail...it was simply a server problem. Another reason not to trust anyone else with your messages. Download, back up, delete the chaff, back up. You can delete that third step if you double up steps two and four.

[krissel]

Hmm, if all your email was still on the server it sounds like you might have had that account set up as IMAP rather than POP.  That would explain why you didn't see your mail if you weren't connected to the server (when it refused your passwords). If you had a POP account the mail is downloaded permanently to your computer. It is then erased from the server unless you tell it to keep it there for a week/month. IMAP keeps all mail on the server until you erase it so it can be accessed by different computers. If you are accessing mail from several accounts on several different computers this is convenient but you don't actually have the mail on any computer. It could also be that you had a mixture of POP and IMAP on the different Macs and this caused some mail to download on one but not on the other.

Check in your Mail/Prefs/Accounts and see if maybe any of those accounts say IMAP at the top under Account Information.

Here is a pretty good explanation of the differences between IMAP and POP:

http://www.helpdesk.ilstu.edu/kb/index.phtml?kbid=1172

[jcarter]

I have 4 accounts at the moment that Ive set up here on my new Mac, they are all POP except one, the mobile.me one and thats the IMAP one.
Its sending but not receiving now, but I dont use that one much, so it is waiting for me to fix it.

Gee, this was a combo of problems, the old Mac did have its own mail problem, but I think that you are right, something with the server perhaps.
But when I got in touch with my web host, he was able to fix it all up. Someting about  my old email, being on what they call their "legacy system".
So he helped me set up the account properly, its got to have some very different settings than the standard 'non legacy' new email.

And the important one, my oldest jcarter(at)capecod.net, Earthlink one, I can now use as webmail.
I would LOVE to have it be both!  Be able to access it on my Mac mail, as well as use the WebMail. But I wont tackle that at the moment, my old brain is still spinning from getting the rest of it fixed.

Thank you all for the help on this, I will look at the links, then sometime next week, try to set up the capecod one here. Then everything will be on one computer in one mail program, that would be just heavenly!
Jane