Successfully delete a POP account in Mail

Hello folks. I want to delete a POP account without deleting all its contents... and have come up with a cunning plan. Please advise if this will work.
I have two POP accounts called OLD and NEW. I wish to delete the OLD account and keep the NEW.
1. Move all inbox contents of OLD into inbox of NEW. OLD inbox is now empty.
2. Move all drafts contents of OLD into inbox of NEW. OLD drafts is now empty.
3. SENT is a single inbox, labelled LOCAL. Leave this as is.
4. In MAIL>PREFERENCES>ACCOUNTS, Delete OLD inbox.
Will this work - i.e. will that delete the OLD inbox whilst leaving the contents of NEW intact? My fear is that messages are somehow tagged and the deleting process will destroy messages that were PREVIOUSLY in OLD.
Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated. Thanks .

Sure, I understand.
You can move mail either to your POP Inbox (in which case, Mail will actually try to send those messages back through the mail server - I believe it will try to use the OLD SMTP server, so if that's defunct, it might not work).
Or you can move the messages to a local mailbox. Since you've already downloaded them, they're technically stored locally, but moving them to a local mailbox will keep them safe from POP deletion.
Note: if you have a lot of messages (thousands), I would recommend using right-click and Copy To, rather than drag-and-drop (which moves), especially if you're sending them back out to the NEW account. If the process fails, a copy is easier to recover from.
Either way, once they're safely copied out of OLD, you can delete that account.
Matt

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I had current backups for everything, so now I'm looking for guidance to repair / replace the damaged POP account.
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My reluctance stems from prior nightmares trying to retrieve archival and current email after rebuilding com.apple.mail.plist files in earlier versions of Mail. My experience yesterday solidified that fear. If Apple had some retrieval / rebuild utility that matched the current numbers of messages from any given account (including draft, sent, inbox, etc.) and then came up with the same numbers of re-imported messages on the other end, I'd have a lot more confidence in the process. Instead, I went from 1,024 existing messages to 623 after re-creating the account.
Believe me, I'm very appreciative of your attention, but wiping out years worth of messages with very little expectation of ever getting the full complement back is daunting. I'm going to re-investigate Mail Steward and (one hopes) find a more stable way to archive important email outside the Mail app structure.
For now, I'll take your advice about dragging all the existing messages from the POP account and dragging them to their respective places in the new IMAP account. (I asked my most recent question because I've read elsewhere that dragging files from POP to IMAP accounts often results in incomplete transfers.)
I apologize if it seems I'm ungrateful and unwilling to take good advice. I've had more problems with Leopard than the past two iterations of OS X combined, and I'm annoyed by having to waste three full days trying to fix this 10.5.2 gremlin.
Thanks again,
Tim

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Successfully delete a POP account in Mail

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