Mail settings on an iphone 5s

[TPMB12]

How can you stop a new email account from sending 500 emails from your work email to your phone? Seriously, I get 500 old emails sent to my phone every time I delete the last 500. Not funny, not impressed.

Seriously I heard iPhones were supposed to be intuitive and simple to use. I've used Android and BlackBerry phones before without this hassle. I had something similar with my Android phone when I sent work emails to it. Sorted that by limiting updates to 25 and stopping the old emails getting sent through. Easy. I just can't see any option in the iphone menus to prevent the 500 emails coming through each time.

This might not be a problem but I've got a lot of emails on the server at work. It might be bad form to use your work email account as an archive but that's what we all do here. I'm not looking forward to deleting over 10k emails in blocks of 500.

Help is needed. Any ideas to stop this before my phone meets the wall with prejudice!

[PaulF]

There is a setting that only takes the mails from the last week

Settings>Mail>Accounts>"Work Account"> Mail days to Sync

Is that set to "No Limit"?

[TPMB12]

There is no such option. There's the pop account and mail server details but no such option. Even on advanced there's nothing like that.

Really must update ios I think

[PaulF]

Which version of IoS are you running?

It might depend on the mail server? I see the option with my work (Exchange/Outlook.com) but not Gmail. Can you connect that way rather than as a POP account?

[TPMB12]

10.3.2.

I'm not sure. TBH it was a pain setting it up at all.

[SteveC]

Why don't you want those emails?
The phone will try to replicate your entire email system. If you're using POP it will try to download all your messages eventually.

[fuaran]

Or use IMAP if the server supports that? Its usually a better option than POP.

[TPMB12]

Not on my phone! I use the phone to check new emails then delete all but the most urgent ones that need reply before I can get back to my laptop. I prefer to archive emails on server (through outlook) not on my phone.

Actually it's 496 emails. It no longer gets up to the full 500.

Updating the os right now.

Tried imap but it didn't work so used pop. Everyone is on pop without this issue. Except for one awkward individual who got set up with imap somehow.

BTW the server is home server 2011. We're not a big network and don't have too many users (IIRC 10 email accounts set up through the server).

One question, if I leave the 496 emails on the phone will that stop new ones coming through? Do I have to delete some to get new mail?

[SteveC]

Having a load of emails on your phone shouldn't stop new ones arriving.
And once you've deleted them they shouldn't reappear.
The way you're trying to use your phone is similar to the way I did when I was using POP on one of my accounts but moving to IMAP and having everything everywhere now suits me rather better.

[TPMB12]

TBH I only use the phone for emails in evenings or weekends. If in get something that needs a response I reply, if not it gets deleted. Ideally I have no emails on.The phone.because that means I've got no urgent matters to deal with.

[ian]

I think the problem is that you're using a phone in a way not usually encountered in modern humans. Email, more usually by IMAP, synchronize across devices (and this is the benefit of IMAP over POP). The email lives on the server. You can categorize or flag those that are important. If you want you can just synchronize your 'important' folder from the  server.

I'm not sure, tbh, that POP or IMAP work any different regardless of phone or desktop OS.

You'll view this era with achingly fond nostalgia, like the girl from sixth form you never got off with, when we're all direct messaging through Twitter.

[Kim]

I think the problem is that you're using a phone in a way not usually encountered in modern humans. Email, more usually by IMAP, synchronize across devices (and this is the benefit of IMAP over POP). The email lives on the server. You can categorize or flag those that are important. If you want you can just synchronize your 'important' folder from the  server.

Indeed.  POP is a relic of a bygone age, when people only had one computer - probably networked over wet string - and it made sense to store the one and only copy of your emails locally.

While service providers took their time to embrace IMAP, the better POP clients developed bodges like leaving copies on the server and only downloading new messages that made using multiple clients feasible.  This perpetuated somewhat into the early days of IMAP in large organisations, where it was for whatever political reason easier to store mail in users' profiles than upgrade the storage capacity of the mail servers.  (Microsoft, meanwhile, were off doing their own thing, where the killer feature of being able to invite people to meetings lead to the rise of the worst mail client known to man, and the steady demise of proper quoting.)

These days it's expected (for good reason) that you'll be using the IMAP cached-copy-of-what's-on-the-server approach on mobile (albeit sometimes with a proprietary protocol).  That mobile clients support POP at all is rather quaint, so it's hardly surprising that they haven't added all the 1990s workarounds needed to do a pale imitation of IMAP functionality. 

And on the gripping hand, if you wanted software with a multitude of obscure settings to configure, you wouldn't have bought a product of the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia.

[Greenbank]

One question, if I leave the 496 emails on the phone will that stop new ones coming through? Do I have to delete some to get new mail?

As others have said, new ones will always come in.

What's happening is this:-

When you first connected the phone would have downloaded the most recent 500 emails for the account that it hasn't already seen, i.e. the most recent 500 emails.

If you delete any of these from the phone then it wants to download more (older) emails to get you back up to that 500 limit of emails it hasn't shown you before.

So if you delete all of those 500 emails in one go then the phone would download the next oldest 500. Lather rinse repeat until you have eventually downloaded and deleted every email so that the phone has seen them all.

The phone keeps track of the unique identifiers (that the POP3 mail server adds) for each of the emails that it has seen, that way it knows whether to present you with anything new or not.

It's also aware of time though, so even if you've got 500 emails on display (because you told it to show a maximum of 500) then new emails that come in since it last checked will be downloaded to the phone, even if this puts you over the 500 limit.

This is why one of my inboxes (with a 200 email download limit) currently has 1229 new messages indicated on my iPhone. The POP3 Inbox it is connecting to has more than 5000 emails in it (moving this webmail to IMAP and sorting out some basic filtering has been on my TODO list for ages. What I tend to do is download all of the emails using thunderbird [as a backup] and then move all but the last 4 weeks or so into a different folder [on the webmail server]. The biggest blocker is that I've gone from ~5 spams a day to ~200 a day - on an email address I've had for ~20 years - usually the spam calms down after a few weeks but this has been going on for 6 months, so I might need to do something more proactive about it.)

In your situation I'd just mark all of the existing messages as read (rather than deleting them from your phone) and then deal with anything new that comes in as it comes in.

If you want to have no emails in your inbox on your phone for that inbox (i.e. don't want to see anything before now) you're going to have to go through the process of downloading them all and deleting them all, doesn't take too long if you do it in batches of 500 though (and remember to do it over wifi!). That way the phone will have seen every old email and know not to download it again.

Having multiple access points to the same email (mobile, webmail, thunderbird desktop client) via POP3 is manageable when the email volume is low (fewer than 20 a day) but after that it becomes a chore.

[TPMB12]

It's not an easy job. I'm an Android user normally and used.to b get work emails on my Android phone. Unlimited data means no issues. On that I can select all emails deselect the ones I want to.keep then select delete.

On my work phone, the 5s, I can't see how to do the same thing. Unless I'm missing something it's not giving me the option to select 500 emails in one go. The only thing I can do is select edit then select one.email at a time then selecting delete every so often to delete blocks of emails. Or swiping across the email to delete them one at a time.

11000 emails deleted one at a time is a chore. If someone can.tell me how to select all on iphone mail please do.

[SteveC]

Assuming they are all in one folder. Edit-> delete all

[TPMB12]

No delete all option on my phone.

If you open the mail folder, select edit you get a mark all option. There's delete and move options but they're greyed out. So you select mark all and you get flag or mark as read/unread a appropriate plus cancel. There's no option to mark all for deleting that I can see.

[TPMB12]

BTW a work colleague who had one of these phones thinks something is strange about this. They are convinced it's missing an option to do this. However they're using an iphone 6 or 7 or whatever the latest one from earlier this year was.

[ian]

This is likely because you're looking at emails on your server. Your phone is downloading copies via POP. You can't delete the server versions via POP (as far as I know, I don't use POP*).

You'd do a lot better using IMAP if your system supports it, it will let you interact with a server-based email system in a way that doesn't involve practical demonology.

*Actually, the Internet suggests that it can be done by going to the advanced settings for the mailbox account and each folder and unchecking the 'on the server' option.

[Biggsy]

Are you free to install an alternative email app on this work phone?  There are lots even for iThings - not all supporting POP but many do, and perhaps with ways of organising that you might prefer.

[TPMB12]

Stuck with pop.

It's downloading copies of the emails, latest first..delete 500 of these and the next 500 get downloaded. Deleting on the phone does not delete.on the server. The issue is I cannot mass delete 500 emails from the phone in one block by selecting a select or delete all check box as android does. As much as it's a pain to.have to.delete 11000 emails in 500 blocks it's a lot easier doing that.than marking/ deleting emails from the phone one at a time. This last option is where I'm at.

There's no option to change the mail app, the connection (pop only) and I'm stuck with the lack of a select all or delete all option.

BTW I can deselect the folder but doing that will.be pointless as I'd not get any work emails. I guess some set up all sorts of filters and folders but I've not got any of that. Put simply I.need to delete all old emails from my phone. Once deleted they won't come back and I'll only see new emails.

[Biggsy]

Do you mean the phone has been disabled from installing new apps?

Otherwise you don't have to replace the existing email app, just ignore it (and have it set to ignore your emails) and install another email app from the app store to exist along side it.