First off, so far the application is doing a fantastic job. I will buy it soon.
Now that I’m not trying to do ten things at once and at the same time trying to wrap my head around IMAP accounts and how they work, I apologize for some of my vague remarks today. “It” I assume you’ve figured out by now is my Mac.
What if the company that hosts my Domain, server were to crash. How and where would I find the back up emails on my computer? I was going to just enable my POP account once in a while to download the emails but if I don’t have to, even better.
How long do you think I should train the application before using it on my laptop as well? When I copy the application does “all of the training go with it”?
Thanks Again for the App and the lesson in IMAP accounts.
Second thought. Since the laptop is my wife’s and it rarely leaves the house and it’s wireless network, wouldn’t it be best to just run the app on the tower and set up the laptop with a IMAP account?
The files are stored on your Mac in pretty much the same fashion as POP e-mails. You’ll be able to browse and search them within Mail, whether or not the server is running or you are connected to the Internet. Make sure that you have Mail set to keep “All messages and their attachments” for offline viewing.
You could put it on your laptop right after the initial training. The instructions for copying it are here.
Yes, that would be a bit simpler. Then you would only have to train it on the tower.
I just did a little experiment with Mail set to keep “All messages and their attachments” for offline viewing. I deleted an email from the server, labeled the file green in the inbox>messages folder, quit Mail and relaunched Mail. The email was gone from both my inbox in Mail and the file was also gone from the folder. So it seems that if something were to happen to the server the emails would also disappear on my HD. What am I missing as far as having a back up from the copies on the server?
The reason the e-mails disappeared from your hard drive is that Mail keeps its cache in sync with the server. It’s like how deleting an Address Book contact on your iPhone will also delete it from your Mac.
This protects you in the event that the server is not available or your account is deleted. You’ll still have copies of all the messages. It won’t delete them just because it can’t connect to your account. (This is actually safer than POP, because there are copies of the messages on each Mac and on the server, rather than just on your Mac.)
It does not protect you against accidentally deleting the individual messages or mailboxes. If you delete something, IMAP assumes you meant to do that, and it will propagate the change to all the devices.
If you want a backup that’s separate from the server, you could use backup software such as Time Machine. Or you could copy messages to mailboxes that are “On My Mac”—this could be automated with a rule. What I do is archive older messages using EagleFiler.