Will emails from inaccessible Gmail account be deleted from Mac Mail?

June 14, 2018 5:00 PM

I'm changing jobs, and my work Gmail account will be out of commission after my last day. I have some old emails I'd like to retain access to (for sentimental, not business, reasons) but will probably not have time to hunt them all down before the deadline. When the account is closed, will old emails still be visible in Mac Mail, or will it clear them out when it syncs?

I don't know exactly how the process works on the back end -- i.e., whether control of the account is transferred to someone else in the company or whether the account is actually shut down.

posted by SpiralT to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

I don't know the answer to the specific question, but can't you change/stop the synch, or change the synch to another account?
posted by GeeEmm at 5:13 PM on June 14, 2018

Best answer: If you're using IMAP (and it sounds like you are), then I believe the answer is yes, when the account disappears, the copies on your Mac will disappear. If you're using POP, then there is no sync happening, and those e-mails have just been downloaded to your Mac.

Google has set up a handy place for exporting all your data: Takeout.
posted by adamrice at 5:20 PM on June 14, 2018 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: GeeEmm, I thought of that, but I've been getting some "goodbye" emails that fall into the keeper category, and I'd hate for one of those to show up in between when I stopped syncing and when the account is shut down. A bounced email is no big deal, they'd figure out a way to resend or at least would know I didn't get it, but it'd be really unfortunate if they thought their email got through and never got a response from me.

adamrice, thanks. I'm doing Takeout now.
posted by SpiralT at 5:32 PM on June 14, 2018

Response by poster: In case it helps anyone else who reads this in the future: I used Google Takeout to successfully get an archive of the account. I noticed that it didn't include files or folders that had been shared to me, even ones that I'd added to my Drive, so I had to then download those manually.
posted by SpiralT at 12:00 AM on June 15, 2018

If you are using the mail app on your mac, you can create an "on my mac" folder and simply drag the emails you want to save into that folder. This will copy (or possibly copy-and-delete, e.g., "move") those emails into a directory stored on your mac. Once this is done, nothing that happens in the old work account will affect those archived emails. Alternatively, if you have multiple IMAP-type email accounts that you access through the mail app on your mac, you can move emails from one account to another account simply by dragging and dropping them into a directory in the target account. Similar to storing those emails locally on your mac, once they are in the target account they won't be affected by whatever happens to your old work account.
posted by slkinsey at 8:36 AM on June 15, 2018

I don't have a mac, so can't speak for Mac Mail specifically, but I was using Mozilla Thunderbird with a GMail Hosted account last year until that job finished. I still have and can read all the emails in Thunderbird.

I do get prompted for a login when I go into that acoount, but just cancel out of it. I did have all the settings enabled for keeping emails on this pc, whatever the age and syncing etc, and disable purging. So if you setup Thunderbird on your mac, and set it to sync frequently, keeping all mails locally, that would seem to work.
posted by Boobus Tuber at 11:50 AM on June 15, 2018