Access email if an account is deleted
I'm being advised by AOL, where I have my email, that I must delete and then create an account with the smae name and password in order to be able to access AOL's popserver and smtp server with higher security. But I don't want to lose access to ten years of emails. Rather than delete, can I rename the account to another username and create the new account with my current username? That way I hopefully can access my old emails on my PC with the renamed username, and get new emails with the current username?
If that is not possible, any other ideas would be appreciated.