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The situation:
I have an account with BlueHost, and I use IMAP/Outlook for my emails. On my BlueHost account I have an option (Cloud Performance Hosting) I want to get rid of. BlueHost says that it's impossible to downgrade: I have to create a new account and move everything there(!). Yes, you read that right.

The question:
If I follow BH's advice my mails will no longer be on the IMAP server since my account will be gone. Will the local copies of the mails in my .PST file also be deleted if Outlook can't find (them on) the server?
Yes, I do make backups, but retrieving an older mail from a .PST backup file is rather cumbersome.

Most questions I find are about the reverse situation: deleting local emails.

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  • "Will the local copies of the mails in my .PST file also be deleted if Outlook can't find (them on) the server?" - Outlook doesn't use automatically archive emails permanently to .PST by default, in my experience, IMAP connections are cache results from the server. If you were to delete your account, before you migrated your emails, you might not be able to retrieve all your emails.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Aug 15, 2022 at 20:02

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Once your mailbox is re-established in the new account it's likely that Outlook will see those as having been removed from the server and the sync will remove local copies. As I recall, BH uses email address for authentication to a mailbox which means your new account will look the same as your old account from Outlook's perspective, thus Outlook will try to sync to an empty mailbox.

If you want to be sure you keep them, back them up. If you want them in your inbox you can just copy them back in.

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