Apple Mail: Sunsetting email accounts while retaining email messages?

I'm a bit of fiend for backup, the result of a near disastrous near miss loss.

I was at a coffeeshop 4 years ago when a heavy (60lb) framed piece of art fell off the wall. It fell straight down unto my 8 once, porcelain coffee cup, cleaving perfectly it in to two pieces like a diamond cutter.

The backside of the cup propelled the coffee (it was full at the time) into an arc that fell squarely into the middle of the keyboard of my Macbook Pro, at the time.

Coffee was pouring out the ports. I shut it down instantly. Took it home and ran a cleaning fluid thru it until it ran clear and then it dry for 3 days before turning it on.

I was able to turn it on but it could never hold a charge, even after replacing the battery. The cafe bought me a brand new Macbook Pro and I was able to transfer everything but it scared the **** out of me.

I went from a single layer of back up to a triple layer.

1. SyncThing makes both my MacPro and Macbook Pro behave as one device, what I do on one, is on the other.
2. Time Machine is for temporary backup and if needed, using the Recover volume, a full restore.
3. Superduper runs in the wee hours and makes a complete disk image of each device. It will not only restore the files but the context of the documents as to how they are stored.

No one can plan for the rarest of events.

Thank you, that worked perfectly. I couldn't believe how easy that was to execute. I make heavy use of mailboxes with rules to move mail there.

If Apple's support was better written and mentioned that each account's inbox is what gets deleted, it would have been clearer that to protect email for deleted accounts, all you had to do was move them to other mailboxes.

Thanks again.

I wish that I had not been part of an 'interesting story' but if you can use it to help other people, please do.

This may be a bit of an off topic to the origination of this thread but when it comes to backup, the way we see it now, I wish that there was a broader view of what needs to be retained.

The focus of backup has long been the retention of whatever final state someone has left a document or file in up to the point of the disaster that threatens loss. Once the negative state is resolved, recovery, and hopefully, back to work. This is the absolute bottom line purpose of backup.

When I had my artful coffee disaster, I was able to recover all of the files up the point that stopped me in my tracks. What was not recovered was the state of my work, its context, or the underpinning state of all the utilities that supported that setup, preferences, settings etc.

That took nearly two weeks and I was never confident that I had regained that work context state.

As a researcher I often have numerous apps open, multiple windows, those windows have multiple tabs open, and they are in work groups across multiple 'spaces.' In other words, I make heavy usage of what Apple has given us. But in an OS crash, system freeze or in the case of flying artwork, none of that context is retained and the meaning that it holds.

In archeology and paleontology, context is everything. It's wonderful to find that perfect, ancient clay pot or an amazing fossil but it's often what is found next to it or in same soil layer that tells the story of that artifact and gives it meaning.

It's been somewhat frustrating to me that Apple has not understood this and added a 'snapshot' feature to Time Machine, the ability during the recovery to return to the state just before the disaster. A set of options like, do you wish to open that app and its windows again? Would you like to return all spaces? Etc.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents and then some.

Thanks again for your assistance.