Deleted POP account - lost Inbox & Sent mail

Question

I was unable to set up a new POP Account in Mail (my email service was moved to a new host) without deleting the existing POP Account, because the new account had to have the same username. When I did that and created a new Account the emails in my Inbox and Sent folders were gone. Mail in other folders was fine. Is there any way to recover the original Inbox and Sent emails?

Answer 1

You're welcome.
If the incoming mail server address remains the same with the new host, did the account's user name change?
An account's user name and password is what checks the incoming mail server for new messages. An account's user name is usually the portion of your email address in front of the @ sign only but with some providers it is your entire email address.
The outgoing mail server has nothing to do with and has no bearing on creating an email account with Mail or with any email client.
When creating an account with Mail, an account named folder is created within the Mail folder at Home > Library > Mail named by the user name and incoming mail server for the account. The outgoing or SMTP server has nothing to do with this, is not stored in the same location and although Mail's connection test with the outgoing mail server or SMTP server may fail when creating the account, it does not or should not prevent you from creating the account and adjusting the SMTP server settings afterwards.
You can add a number of additional SMTP servers to Mail or delete an SMTP server from Mail after creating an email account which has no bearing on an email account's set up. You can have multiple SMTP servers to choose from - one used to send messages with an account when connected to the internet via your ISP at home and another when connected to the internet via a different ISP at work or elsewhere.
Based on the information you provided so far, there was no reason to delete the old account from Mail. You may not recall seeing the error message but it was provided. You select OK in the error message box to delete the account which informs you all account setup information and locally stored mailboxes for the account will also be deleted when doing so.
FileSalvage will pull up all deleted data that is still available for recovery - located on an area of the hard drive that has not be over-written with other data after the previous data stored in the same location was selected for deletion.
You will look for mailboxes (folders with an .mbox extension) and/or .emix files with each individual .emix file representing a single message that was stored in a mailbox.