Duplicated mail settings caused email loss in Mail on Lion Oh dear, not having much luck at the moment. Having recently wasted hours on a simple problem, I've transferred my anti-Midas magic to a friend, and lost some email data. Could someone advice (a) whether the below was an obviously stupid idea, and (b) if I can do anything in the way of recovery?

So, my friend uses Hotmail via POP3 in Mail, in Mac Lion on a MBP. This is set to delete mail in a week after it is read from the server (although she trims mail manually in the Hotmail web interface, and is fairly sure old mail wasn't being deleted, since she still has very old mail in her web-based inbox).

OK, so she's started a new company, and has purchased a domain/hosting package, and needed assistance setting it up. The requirement was that mail should pool in her Mail inbox together with Hotmail, but she should have a profile widget in the New Mail interface that lets her set which email address each message should come from.

Easy enough, I reasoned. The domain was already set to forward to her Hotmail address, so the hosting company is not doing any mail holding - just sending it on. I figured that creating a new mail profile which had all her Hotmail credentials except for the From address, which would be the info@example.com address we were setting up, would do the trick. Now, at this stage you're thinking:


that's worth a go,
that won't work, or
don't do that, you'll break it!


I'm hoping you're not thinking 3, since I went ahead and did that, and although the profile created, it caused an error, and did not appear to work. The error was:

The account path /Users/&lt;name&gt;/Library/Mail/V2/POP-&lt;email&gt;@&lt;pop3-server&gt;
is already being used by the account "Hotmail".


"OK", said I - and duly deleted the newly created "MyDomain" account. Sadly this removed the inbox, drafts and sent items related to the (perfectly functional) "Hotmail" account (which I didn't touch). A call to Apple support in India resulted in the specialist logging a call - and he seemed amenable to the idea that, since the profile popped up that error when we saved it, it should have warned us that it was about to do something catastrophic. I offered to log a bug with Apple via the web, but he said there would be no need, since he'd already done it.

So, either I hit against a Mail bug, and I should be hopping up and down, or I did something perfectly stupid, and I should be sitting in the naughty corner for a few hours. Honest thoughts very welcome on this point.

Meanwhile, my friend and I - in the absence of backups - are trying data recovery software (Disk Drill) to get back the mails that have been lost. We will see if this works tomorrow, but if any other ideas are forthcoming, I am all ears. We've dug into the Hotmail mail folder, and the important-sounding folders are 40KB or so - i.e. basically empty.

Help! and TIA.

Edit: it's a long shot, but my friend might have been running iCloud. Should this back up all her email, or just me.com email? We went into the interface and couldn't see anything under email (everything seemed empty) but I guess that might be because she wasn't logged in, or iCloud doesn't back this stuff up, or it wasn't running...
If I'm reading the initial question correctly, you wish to select which account new mail comes from.

In Mail prefs > Accounts > Account Information tab you can enter multiple email addresses in the Email Address field. You must separate them by commas.



When you create a new message The From dropdown will list every email address. These addresses will be used in the From: field.