E-mail loss after changing form POP3 to IMAP

Mail
1

Hello,

I had a problem, that I created subfolder of inbox on my internet e-mail interface (provider is Webglobe.cz). So I found out article that explained the fact that POP3 shows only the new emails in inbox and to be able to access all the subfolders I have to change type of connection to IMAP.

So I did as been said, created the backup and exported the e-mails, than I Removed the account and then added it back manually choosing the IMAP variant.

Now the problem. In the inbox of this e-mail account, there are only e-mails in inbox for the begging of the year. All older emails in inbox have disappeared. Subfolders work does work perfectly.

The only e-mails that got “saved” are the “flagged e-mails” which are only accessible form the “flagged” folder in “Favourites”.

And the same problem is also on my internet e-mail interface, missing all e-mails older than the 1st of the January 2024.

I found out in “C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\eM Client\43d82c72-051b-4b83-bc03-2db1f2ac9237\a4a1283a-aef1-4a72-b7ab-8b4d435b46b9” which is a subfolder where data for this e‑mail are stored, that “mail-data.dat “ has size of like 611 MB. Which tells me that the data for the “lost e-mails” should be there, considering there were around 500 e-mails.

The question is, what should I do to restore my e-mails?

Should I Restore from backup? What would restoring from backup do with a change from POP3 to IMAP? And would have to export the “new e‑mails” that have arrived after the backup has been done.

Or should I try just to Import the e-mail I exported before the change from POP3 to IMAP? I read while browsing the eM Client help sites, that the POP3 downloads and stores emails due to limited capacity of the e-mail server. So now I do not know if it would actually help me or if it would exceed the capacity of e-mail server.

Now that I found the probable problem (the fact that POP3 was storing the e-mails and the IMAP does not do that), should I rather go back to POP3 and find another way of getting my e-mails from subfolders from inbox in my internet e-mail interface (to the e-mail server)?

Thak you in advance for any help. As you can see, I still do not understand where exactly the problem is and what should be the best solution for this problem. And my terminology is also not optimal.

2

Yes. Because POP3 deletes the messages from the server, older messages will only have been in the POP3 folders in eM Client.

With POP3 the message store is your computer.

With IMAP the message store in on the server, and you have a cached copy in eM Client.

3

Thank you for your response.

I would like to know how the eM Client would behave in each scenario…

Does Restoring from the backup changes the “preset” of e-mail from IMAP back to POP3?

Does making the same procedure of “deleting” the connection and going back to POP3 restores the data it once saved on m PC?

What would happen after importing the e-mails I saved separately? What would happen if the e-mail server’s storage overflowed?

How does POP3 behave, if I would create the Subfolders of the inbox myself and manually moved the stored e-mails there?

How can I check that all emails saved by POP3 are safely imported / restored back to system?

Thank you in advance for your answer. I am trying to get information I would possibly get by “trial and error” method which is unsafe at this point in my opinion.