using email on iPhone and laptop?

Question

Level 1

74 points

using email on iPhone and laptop?

My iPhone arrives tomorrow and I would like to use its email capability without interfering with my desire to have all my email on my laptop (i.e., I don't want to have some sent and received email on the iPhone that isn't on the laptop). I have three email accounts (Gmail, .Mac, and my university account and I use pop for all of them), though I use the university account for 95+% of my email. With this in mind, what is the best way to accomplish this? My initial thought is that I could accomplish this by:

(1) Making sure that the iPhone and the laptop are not checking email at the same time.

(2) Making sure that when the iPhone grabs email, it leaves it on the server and doesn't delete it. This way I can download the email to my laptop at a later time.

(3) cc'ing myself when sending messages from the iPhone.

Is there something I am forgetting or can this be done a better way?

I would love to hear from someone who has experience with this on the iPhone or another device.

2.4 GHz MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.4.10), 4GB RAM, 160GB HD

Posted on Jul 1, 2007 5:35 PM

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Answer 1

morph686

Level 1

0 points

Jul 1, 2007 6:40 PM in response to G. L. Gray

Since they are POP accounts, you will probably have email spread across both devices. GMail does offer the option to keep mail when accessed via POP. Not sure about .Mac or your school accoung.

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Answer 2

L2

Level 1

46 points

Jul 2, 2007 5:20 AM in response to G. L. Gray

I had the same dilemma because I use Entourage as my e-mail client rather than Apple's Mail.app, and what I chose to do was set up the e-mail accounts using the IMAP instead of POP on the iPhone only. I left my laptop e-mail settings alone (they're POP). The .Mac will be okay since it seems to use IMAP already. I found that there were errors when I entered the settings directly into iPhone, so I set it up in Mail and then synced the settings over and it worked.

IF YOU USE ENTOURAGE MAIL CLIENT for non .Mac accounts:
On my laptop, I added my e-mail account that I check in Entourage in Apple's Mail.app only making the account type to be IMAP (rather than POP which is what my setting is in Entourage). I left the .Mac account which was already in .Mail alone. By setting up my Entourage account to be IMAP when I check it on the iPhone, it allows me to see all messages that haven't downloaded to my laptop yet (for my Entourage account). I can read, delete, send etc. Then when I open up Entourage, it only downloads the unread messages. One drawback is that I can't download the sent messages to my Entourage client. I would have to cc myself on the message if I wanted it to come through on my Entourage account.

IF YOU USE APPLE'S MAIL.APP as your client:
When you sync from the iPhone to the Mail.app I believe it will sync all of your messages including sent ones.

Hope that helps - Go PSU!

Powerbook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.3)

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Answer 3

lfcfan

Level 1

0 points

Jul 4, 2007 3:49 PM in response to G. L. Gray

You can also set up your iPhone to never delete emails from the server (settings>mail>[name of your account]>advanced>delete from server) and then set up your laptop mail client to remove emails from the server once they are pulled.

I should say that I am still trying to perfect this set up, but for the most part this has worked for me. This way, the iPhone mail application works more like a "mirror" image of what is currently on the server.

MacBook Mac OS X (10.4.10)

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Answer 4

PTBoater

Level 4

2,857 points

Jul 4, 2007 4:20 PM in response to G. L. Gray

(2) Making sure that when the iPhone grabs email, it
leaves it on the server and doesn't delete it. This
way I can download the email to my laptop at a later
time.

Yup, this works. This is what I do.

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Answer 5

G. L. Gray Author

Level 1

74 points

Jul 4, 2007 4:50 PM in response to PTBoater

(2) Making sure that when the iPhone grabs email,

it

leaves it on the server and doesn't delete it.

This

way I can download the email to my laptop at a

later

time.

Yup, this works. This is what I do.

That is what I have been doing this week and it has worked well. I have also changed the settings on my laptop so that it leaves the mail on the server for one day and then deletes it. That gives me plenty of time to grab the message on the iPhone before the MacBook Pro deletes it.

This seems to be working well for now. I just wish mail on the iPhone had spam filtering and I wish that I could delete multiple messages at once.

Thank you to everyone for the feedback.

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