bad mac mail app, bad
worst. night. ever. I was helping a friend of mine change his Apple OS X Mail.app account settings to use his new mail host last night, and in doing so accidentally deleted all of his mail. Here’s what happened:
I added a new account to mail.app to check emai, and deleted his old account (since he couldn’t check that account anymore). Upon deleting the old account all of his messages instantly dissapeared… NO WARNING AT ALL. As soon as I hit the minus button I could see all the email in the background being quickly deleted. Not deleted to the trashcan or deleted items… but just instantly deleted. I had to try a undelete program to recover some of the messages off the hard drive.
1) There was no warning or “are you sure” type message. Every message that the account had ever received or sent was simply gone.
2) Why not send them to the trashcan or deleted email folder? Nice thinking apple.
3) Sure, there might be a technical reason behind this, but in my opinion it’s silly to bind email messages to email accounts. Deleting an account should have nothing to do with deleting email messages. Messages should not be tied to mail accounts, or at least make that marriage more visible and give the option on deleting an account with messages that would move messages to a global inbox.
I posted the problem on the official apple discussion forums: