Not a question of trusting that SME won't lose the emails ... and I suppose that it wouldn't matter much if the online mailbox were emptied, as long as I can put everything back the way it was. The "upstream" copies would no longer exist but that wouldn't matter as long as the relevant workstations had their copies. So I take it that SME can't be configured to do this out of the box, and there's not a contrib or a "config setprop" that can make it work this way. Correct, devs? And thanks for your kind attention. (And, BTW, I am a "he.")