Outlook 2016, What happens to email when you delete an account?

Hello,

We are getting ready to change internet service providers and we will be discontinuing an email address with which we have been receiving POP3 mail for many years. We are already using our new email address, which is a gmail address, with Outlook, and that is an IMAP account. At the moment, Outlook is checking both servers and we are dealing with two inboxes and two sets of folders, which is alright with me during this transition.

When we discontinue our internet service with our current provider, I want to discontinue having Outlook check the POP email address, but I want to keep the email that we currently have on the computer itself. I am fine with having the 2 accounts remain on the computer, I would be fine with minimizing the Inbox for the old address and delving into the folder tree if/when we need to. That is the only place where several years of emails reside (other than our backup).

My question is: when I go to the account settings and remove the email address account we won't be using anymore, will everything we have in that account's Inbox and associated subfolders remain, or will Outlook want to delete all of it? Sorry if that's a silly question, but I want to be sure I don't cause a disaster.

Thanks!

It's not a silly question, it hinges a lot on whether you've cancelled the E-Mail account with the provider, that will delete the messages from their server. I have a client that has messages on the computer in an E-Mail Client he is no longer using but didn't want to lose the messages so I just went into its Accounts and changed/broke the POP and SMTP settings. He can still read the messages he has on OE Classic but decided to buy Microsoft Outlook 2016. Most times folks will choose to leave messages on the server for a period but can still access them when away from home using Webmail provided by their ISP.

Thanks for your reply, Berton.

The email does not reside at all on the server. When I discontinue service with that ISP, the email account I have with them will also be shut down. I just wondered what would happen if I go into Outlook's settings and choose to delete that address/account from there.

So if I opened Outlook and went to the File tab -->Account Settings-->Email accounts-->Highlighted the POP account whose server I will no longer be accessing to get email and then click the "Remove" button....if I then went back to Outlook, all of the email I have ever received on that account would be gone?

All I want out of this is for Outlook to no longer check the server in question for mail anymore. So I want to cut Outlook off from that POP server. That account will no longer be used to send and receive mail. Otherwise, I want everything to remain on my computer as is. The gmail account will be the active email account.

So I want to cut Outlook off from that POP server. That account will no longer be used to send and receive mail.

They way I did it for my client was simply change the POP and SMTP settings in OE Classic [should work in any installed E-Mail Client] to something like pop.mymail.xxx and smtp.mymail.xxx, the program still works to view messages already received but will pop up errors that the server/s can't be reached for sending and receiving.

Got it! (Doing a happy dance!) I'm just testing it now, and it looks like this is going to work. Outlook is connecting with the gmail account only and ignoring the other one.

How to temporally disable account without deleting in Outlook?