Email difficulties

[Ferretfancy]

I'm a very baffled person at the moment !

Put as simply as I can, I have two email accounts, one with Google, and one with Demon, my service provider. I use them both, on my iPhone and on my iMac desktop.
Recently I remade my desktop set up after being offered a cheaper tariff from Demon, and I accepted an offer of a new router. I mention this because it took a few phone calls to sort out.
All has been well until recently, but I now have an odd situation. You would imagine that any mail received should arrive simultaneously on both devices, but now I'm sometimes getting incoming mail on my iMac and not on my iPhone, and at other times getting mail on my phone, and not on my Imac, and this is happening on both the accounts
Prompted by advice from Apple, I have checked all settings, and also did an upgrade and restore on the iPhone, but nothing has changed. On one occasion recently a friend sent me two emails a few minutes apart. One arrived on the iPhone, the other on the Imac. I received a weekly schedule today for my voluntary job, but only on my desktop, it would be much more useful to be able to refer to it on the mobile, but it never arrived.

Has anybody else had a similar problem? Any advice would be more than welcome.

Ferret.

[Stunsworth]

It sounds as if one of the devices isn't set up to use the imap server on your ISP. Imap leaves emails on the server, so if device 1 downloads them - say your iMac, they're still there for device 2 - your phone. I suspect that your iMac is set up to use Pop3 rather than imap as Pop3 deletes the messages after they've been download. So if an email is downloaded to your iMac the phone will never see it.

Hope that make sense.

Some more details...

http://www.hmailserver.com/documentation/latest/?page=whatis_pop3imapsmtp

Your ISP should be able to give you the names of the imap and pop3 servers.

[Ferretfancy]

Stunsworth
Thanks so much for the that. I will, of course check the settings on both devices, and talk to my ISP tomorrow. This could be it!
I'll get back to you as soon as possible to let you know. Meanwhile, many thanks !

[Stunsworth]

Assuming you use Mac Mail, if you load up Mail then go to preferences and click on the 'Accounts' tab you should be able to see if the account(s) are set up to use pop or imap.

[Word]

There are some advantages to using IMAP over POP3, particularly when accessing a single mailbox from multiple devices, but if you want or have to use POP3 you can still configure things so that e-mails will appear on both...

Within the Settings app on the iPhone, under 'Mail, Contacts, Calendars', then the e-mail account in question, then 'Advanced', there is an 'Incoming Settings' section that has a 'Delete from server' option that can be set to 'Never', 'Seven days' or 'When removed from Inbox'. (Interestingly all of those imply that e-mails you read on your iPhone should also turn up on your Mac unless you actively delete or move it on your iPhone.)

The equivalent settings for the Mac's Mail app can be found under the 'Advanced' tab of the 'Accounts' preferences. If 'Remove copy from server after retrieving a message' is set to 'Immediately' then it will no longer be available for download to the iPhone once it has been received on the Mac (though, clearly, you don't want to leave messages on the sever any longer than necessary, lest your in-box fills up and new messages start bouncing).

[OldTechie]

Just to add to the confusion, gmail does not stick to the POP3 specifications in the normal way. The reason is that when you download using POP3, the system has to first send a list of every email on the server, and then the client requests the ones it does not already have. That was fine in the days when the server would declare itself full with a few hundred emails. Now gmail allows you to store millions of emails, so if they used the orginal standard unchanged then you would have to wait for the massive list to download before you could have the last few messages.

To work around this, they note the received date and time when you download an email. Next time you connect they only list the emails received since the noted date and time. So if you connect two devices to it, the first one to request a download gets the email, and the other one does not.

You can set it to work a different way. You can make it list all the emails received in the last 30 days instead. To do this you add the word "recent" to your user name. See http://support.google.com/mail/bin/a...n&answer=47948

If you use IMAP, you don't have this problem, so that is what Google suggests for most users. However, gmail does not use folders as such - it uses labels. IMAP is designed to work with folders - and different email clients behave differently with the gmail system. I think the iPhone may have a client that has special code to handle Google's odd IMAP system. I find it too confusing in MS Outlook and so I use POP3 with gmail-type accounts. You can also use IMAP on one device and POP3 on the other.

I don't think Demon is using Google for their email system - so you should not have any trouble with POP3 for that account. I don't think they support IMAP.

[Stunsworth]

Did you get it to working in the end?