Email setup help needed, for iPod and PC!

[Habylab]

Right ok, I have a probably simple request, but its baffling me. I need to have my iPod and PC download emails. But I need it so that, if i delete an email of my iPod, it isn't there on my PC, and vice versa. But I need it too so that if I download the emails to my iPod, I can still access them on my PC.

I'm using a firefox extension called SimpleMail, that has options for POP3 and IMAP, and is useful and quick compared to thunderbird for me.

I've tried it, but just can't figure it out! A detailed step-by-step guide, would be HUGELY appreciated. Probably put this in the wrong section too, but its the best I could think off.

 

[Didou]

Basicaly any email account with IMAP would be able to do that: Gmail, MobileMe & even Yahoo! offer such services.

Emails are available on all the machines using the IMAP account & even your replies are copied over to all the machines so you can still access them from another machine than the one where you wrote them from.

 

[Habylab]

Ok, but my current setup isn't doing this. When I delete the emails off my iPod, they aren't being deleted off my computer.

 

[Didou]

Are you sure both of them are accessing the email account in IMAP mode ? It sounds like the computer is still using the POP3 protocol.

 

[DelJo63]

clarification: the IMAP is the email server. It allows email to be retained on the server
and to be downloaded to multiple systems.

The delete sequence (from one system) will remove an email from that email client and
then delete it from the IMAP server.

HOWEVER, IMAP has no idea of how many other email-client systems you have and
if email#xxx downloaded to two email-clients and then deleted from only one,
the second email-client will still hold its copy until you delete it from that system.

 

[Habylab]

Oh ok, thanks for the clarification... So what should or can i do?

 

[DelJo63]

one approach is to use the Webmail interface (eg using a browser to access gmail ) instead of the email clients. You can get to it from wherever you are.

to keep a copy of inbound, you can use one of your email client systems

to keep a copy of outbound, just BCC a copy to yourself and use the above to download it too