I inherited a complicated Webform with several hundred submissions. One of the components was a Textfield used to capture the email address of the form submitter. For some reason this is a Textfield and not an E-mail field which prevents me from using the E-mail address to send a confirmation email.

If I were to delete the textfield email component what would happen to all the data? I'm assuming it would be erased.

Is there any way to change the type of a form component while still preserving the data?

I inherited a complicated Webform with several hundred submissions. One of the components was a Textfield used to capture the email address of the form submitter. For some reason this is a Textfield and not an E-mail field which prevents me from using the E-mail address to send a confirmation email.

If I were to delete the textfield email component what would happen to all the data? I'm assuming it would be erased.

Is there any way to change the type of a form component while still preserving the data?

Update: I am using Drupal 7 and Webform 3.19