In this case we’ll leave the desktop PC configured to use POP3, but make a change to an obscure setting.
That way it becomes “just another device” with a window on to the master collection of email stored on your email server. The right solution is to configure your desktop email program – you mentioned it was Outlook – to use IMAP. There are two basic approaches to solving the conflict: the right one, which takes more work, and the practical one, which amounts to a hidden setting. Mail that arrived on the server since the last time it was checked is downloaded to your PC and removed from the server.įrom the phone, the email looks like it disappeared. The net result? That “picture of the mail server” changes every time your desktop email program downloads email. Your mobile device is accessing your email using IMAP, which means that it’s simply providing you a picture of what’s on the mail server.As long as the mail program is running, it happily downloads your email on a regular schedule. You probably also have that desktop email program configured to automatically check for email every so often – perhaps 5 minutes, perhaps 30 or more, but the key is that you don’t have to be around.
Thus when it checks for email it moves that email to your PC, removing it from the mail server.
You have your desktop email program configured to download your email to your PC using POP3.IMAP is perfect for today’s world where we can assume connectivity most of the time, and it’s not at all uncommon to want to access email from different devices and in different ways at different times. Multiple devices could all be accessing that mail server at the same time.Your device is simply a “window” into that master copy. The mail server is the official place that email is kept, not your device.It synchronizes in such a way that when you delete on your device, it’s deleted on the server when you read on your device, it’s marked as read on the server when you move things around in folders on your device, things are moved around in folders on the server. IMAP differs in that instead of moving mail to the device you’re using, it simply makes a copy without removing anything from the server unless you tell it to. Most email programs that run on mobile devices use a different protocol, called IMAP, to access email. When a mobile phone accesses email, it does so from your email service provider, of course, but it does so in a different way. In recent years, however, both of those reasons have pretty much been dispensed with.
Mail service providers often limited the amount of space you could use anyway, often to a small enough amount that even the mail that accumulated over a multi-week vacation could exceed what’s called the “quota”, or the amount of space you’d been allocated.Your PC was where you dealt with your mail, so there was no point in having anything on the server after it was downloaded.This actually made a lot of sense for many reasons, the two most common being: The result is that after the email is copied to your PC, it’s removed from the mail service’s server. POP3, by default, moves the email from the email server to your PC. What that really means is that the programs are configured to use the POP3 email fetching protocol. I’ll review what I think is happening, and then explore the alternatives to fix it.įor years, most desktop email programs were configured to download email from the email service to the computer on which they were running. With more and more people reading email on their smartphones, this is actually a pretty common situation, as it’s very easy to misconfigure things when adding a phone to your setup and have email seemingly disappear.