Problem trying to create an additional mailbox in the native Mail app on iOS/iPadOS

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Problem trying to create an additional mailbox in the native Mail app on iOS/iPadOS

I have configured a POP3/SMTP account for the native Mail app on my iPad. The account uses the British Telecom (BT) mail server.

The account has only the following mailboxes: Inbox, Drafts, Sent and Trash. I would like to be able to add other mailboxes/folders to the account but, every time I try to add a new mailbox, I receive the message: “Unable to Create Mailbox. The mailbox couldn’t be created on the server.”. My initial reaction to this message is what business is it of the mail server if I wish to create a local mailbox in the Mail app in order to store emails somewhere other than the Inbox? This is a POP3 account, not an IMAP account, and the BT mail server is not going to allow the creation of a new folder for a POP3 account.

In reality, I suspect that this is symptomatic of the way that the Mail app is designed, which is more geared to supporting IMAP than POP3. But if anyone has a workaround for this problem, I would appreciate hearing about it.

I think that I am just about to give up on the Mail app and look for another mail app on the iPad - one that provides better support for POP3 and allows the user to create local folders to store emails.

iPad (9th generation)

Posted on Dec 6, 2023 2:16 PM

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Answer 1

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LotusPilot

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308,249 points

Dec 6, 2023 3:46 PM in response to Idomeneus

As you are using BT Mail, instead of using the older (largely obsolete) POP3 Mail protocol, you would be best advised to use IMAP - this being supported by both BT's "Standard" and "Premium" email mail services. IMAP provides considerably more flexibility in creation of server mailbox folders.

To do so, you can either add your Mail account to your iPad using the Add Account wizard (recommended - selecting Other), or configure the IMAP and SMTP server settings manually.

Adding the IMAP account to your iPad before removing the POP3 account from your iPad will allow you to manually move any mail messages from your POP3 mailbox folders (that have already been deleted from the server) to your IMAP mailbox folders.

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Answer 2

Idomeneus Author

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Dec 7, 2023 2:04 PM in response to LotusPilot

Thank you for your reply.

Implicitly, I think you are agreeing with me that the native Mail app on iPadOS does not support POP3 correctly. I will now try to find an app that runs on iPadOS and supports POP3 correctly. If you happen to know of one, please let me know.

My wife and I have five different email addresses between us so that we can be selective about where emails are received. Our two main email addresses (one each) direct the bulk of our emails to the MS Outlook client on our Windows 10 desktop PC. We send and receive many emails and we don’t want our mobile phones (both Android based) and the iPad swamped with all of them. It is only in exceptional circumstances that we might ask for an email to be sent to one of our mobile phones or to the iPad. That is one reason why we don’t use IMAP and prefer POP3.

Also, we are not too happy about leaving emails on the mail server for any length of time after receipt by the mail client. Using Outlook on our Windows 10 system, when configuring a POP3/SMTP account, I can specify that, when an email is received from the mail server, it is deleted immediately on the mail server. This option is not available using the Mail app on iPadOS. You can specify that an email is to be deleted from the mail server seven days after receipt by the Mail app, but that is not really an acceptable option. Alternatively, you can specify that an email is to be deleted from the mail server when you remove it from the Inbox in the Mail app. But the problem is that there is nowhere suitable to move the email to because you cannot create a local mailbox in the Mail app for a POP3/SMTP account. And so we are now back to where we started.

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Problem trying to create an additional mailbox in the native Mail app on iOS/iPadOS

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