Sync email between iPhone 4 and iPad

if your mail account is IMAP this happens automatically
with pop3 you need some sort of a sync program on both devices
not sure if there are some in the app store

This would be a great thing to have. I have an iPad and an iPhone 4, and am experiencing the same thing.
Sly

AT&T is my isp. I have i(pad,phone,mac). I pay for mobile me. I now maintain email (Yahoo mail) on all of my apple products as if each device was the only device used to read email. It is starting to look like I need to forward mail from my primary isp to mobile me if I want my devices to have synchronized email. Has anyone found documentation on how to do this? If Apple is worth a **** they must have a strategy to do this but it seems to be a closely guarded secret even if there are millions of uses on AT&T,
the vendor that provides the network for their phones.

If you want to synchronize email across apple devices it looks like you must use an email service that has IMAP mail servers. If you are an AT&T internet customer you need to find an email service that uses IMAP because AT&T resells Yahoo mail that uses POP mail servers. Mobile Me is an IMAP service. Mobile Me email help has an article to tell you how to forward email you have been getting through a pop mail server to their IMAP mail service and how to use Mobile Me to send mail out using your old email address. You may want to do this so that you do not lose contact with all of your established relationships that communicate using your existing email address. In effect, you can bounce all of your communication off of Mobile Me so that your iPhone, iPad and iMac look at the same email content if you want to see the results of edits (deleting junk) on one device on all devices. You can set up Mobile Me rules to bounce mail to your desktop computer so that you can set up rules to store it on your desktop so that you do not fill up your email storage on Mobile Me. This seems to me to be what you need to do. Please correct me if there is an easier way.

No, that pretty well sums it up and you seem to have a good handle on things, though. Couldn't help noticing, though, that it only took you a short time to start digging out all of that info that you'd been sure Apple was hiding from you ...

And, of course, the more you look the more you keep finding. Thanks for posting your solution, and welcome to Apple Discussions!

If you want to synchronize email across apple devices it looks like you must use an email service that has IMAP mail servers.

Sort of.
If using a POP account, simply set up your email application to leave messages on the server. Then you can read them on all devices. However, they must be deleted from each device if they get downloaded to each device.
On the iPad, Settings > Mail, Contact, Calendar > select an account then Advanced.

See this -> Using a POP account with multiple devices

Couldn't help noticing, though, that it only took you a short time to start digging out all of that info that you'd been sure Apple was hiding from you ...

Do you know how many pages of info he had to go through and make his own connections to find the info? There is no one place to go to find out how to do this. I'm still struggling. I don't think Apple is deliberately hiding, but they sure don't make it straightforward.