what does Apple do when it fetches your email?

[mr magnolia]

after years of Outlook and Outlook Express, we now get emails on an ipad.
This 'doesn't' seem to fetch the emails off the server, which leaves me a bit confused about who controls them, when and how.  I used to think the emails were 'mine' cos you couldnt go and get them again after outlook express had fetched them in.

does apple just read stuff as webmail?  And how come I didn't have to 'properly' login to our virgin account, but just tell the ipad what the account was? And if its just webmail, what does it all mean?

I've a similar level of confusion re google mail fetched in on my android phone, as sometimes it seems to show me the entire history of all emails ever received or sent, and sometimes it just shows me the last few days, as p0er the settings what I made.

yours mumblingly

the old yin

[Jaded]

Possibly the difference between using an account as pop3 compared to IMAP. The latter leaves a copy on the server, accessible by whatever method you choose, and mars the state of the email e.g. as Read or UnRead. The former is not so sophisticated and is not suited to accessing a mail account from multiple devices.

[ed_o_brain]

Holla.


There are two main ways of fetching email. POP3 and IMAP.

With POP3, on a send/receive the email client picks up the email. You can usually configure your email client to either:
a) delete the email after you have downloaded a copy of it
b) delete the email X number of days after you downloaded it
c) leave the email there indefinitely.

b) and c) can be useful options if you are using more than one PC to download email. For example, if you use your iPad mainly just to read email and a PC still to reply to it.


With IMAP mail the email server and email client are synchronised. So mark an email as read or deleted on the client, then it gets marked as read or deleted on the server. this again is quite good if reading email with multiple clients but can have some other drawbacks.

Hope this helps.

[Dibdib]

With IMAP mail the email server and email client are synchronised. So mark an email as read or deleted on the client, then it gets marked as read or deleted on the server. this again is quite good if reading email with multiple clients but can have some other drawbacks.

What drawbacks have you encountered with IMAP?

Historically (as in, back in the bad old days of dial-up) IMAP wasn't appropriate because it was more bandwidth-intensive than POP3, was less suited to offline use, and required more space on the server. These days, these drawbacks typically aren't an issue as connections are so much faster and always-on, and disk space is more generous (gmail gives what, 10gb now?).

For most modern use cases I'd personally say that IMAP is far superior to POP3.

[SteveC]

With POP3, on a send/receive the email client picks up the email. You can usually configure your email client to either:
a) delete the email after you have downloaded a copy of it
b) delete the email X number of days after you downloaded it
c) leave the email there indefinitely.

b) and c) can be useful options if you are using more than one PC to download email. For example, if you use your iPad mainly just to read email and a PC still to reply to it.

I believe that the IOS mail (phone and pad) defaults to 'c)'.  I use Apple Mail.app on the main machine at home, that is set up to delete POP messages once they've been downloaded.  The two iThings do not delete messages on the server.
I've just checked and you can change this under: Settings->Mail->Accounts->Advanced.

S

[ed_o_brain]

Historically (as in, back in the bad old days of dial-up) IMAP wasn't appropriate because it was more bandwidth-intensive than POP3, was less suited to offline use, and required more space on the server. These days, these drawbacks typically aren't an issue as connections are so much faster and always-on, and disk space is more generous (gmail gives what, 10gb now?).

For most modern use cases I'd personally say that IMAP is far superior to POP3.

Personally I'm using IMAP. But it's usefulness is a coefficient of who hosts your IMAP server.

[tonycollinet]

Main issue with IMAP is you have to manage space on the server - assuming there is a limit - so when it fills up, you have to clear it out by moving old mails to local storage.

[mr magnolia]

Well it appears also that new email folders created on the iPad 'do' suck the mail out of the mother server when messages are moved from inbox to new folder...

[ian]

The problem with IMAP is that it's a pain to set up [right!] and not all IMAPs seem to work in the same way. How many folders and where do you want them? The server? Local? How do you delete things? Really delete them? Oh fuck, I have a zombie draft of propagating between devices. Die! Die! Die, you undead fiend!

I mostly have IMAP set up OK (zombie draft issue aside, there's probably one of the myriad settings that doesn't save the draft on the server). That said, for some reason the marked-read doesn't work for my iPhone, so all emails arrive there as unread (but only for my Talk Talk IMAP, not Google) even if they have been opened elsewhere. Strangely, this isn't so for my iPad, which works as anticipated. The settings seem to be the same. Like I say, IMAP can be quirky, but generally a good idea if you have multiple devices.

[Jaded]

The aspect I've not been able to get sorted with IMAP is sent emails. I know I've sent an email, but it isn't there. Doh. It's on a different device.

[Sergeant Pluck]

Same here, with archiving. Anything I archive on my Mac seems to go into an IMAP archive folder which holds only the items that I've archived on this device, whereas I'd prefer it if it was archived all in one place. Mind you my understanding of what archiving is on Gmail is rather poor.

[pcolbeck]

The aspect I've not been able to get sorted with IMAP is sent emails. I know I've sent an email, but it isn't there. Doh. It's on a different device.

Thats a client isse not a server issue. Your mail client will put sent mails in a folder, you need to tell it to stick them in a sent folder that is an Imap folder.

I find the easiest way to do this is to take a look at what the web mail fron end does for your Imap server as regeards sent and junkmail folders etc then set any client mail programs to do the same thing.

As far as deleting emails properly its called purging in IMAP. Most email clients have an option you can set to purge deleted emails on logouty or purge them after a set time.

[drossall]

Most of the mobile devices I have encountered do default to not deleting mail after collecting it. I imagine that the assumption is that the mobile is a secondary device, and your main mail handling is on a PC, so you don't want your interim checks, while out and about, to result in messages missing from your main mail store.

That's certainly an accurate description of the way that I work. I actually have my home mail set up on two mobiles (work and personal), and sometimes check from one and sometimes from the other. If they deleted mail, I'd have it randomly distributed between them and my home PC.

As has been said, you can change the default.