Email POP3 to IMAP

Depends entirely on who your provider is and the features they offer.

I've had this issue for a long long time. It was true under Mobile Me. Now under iCloud, the problem continues, with a slight variation.

If I open an email addressed to my iCloud address on my iMac, that email will not appear in my iPad or iPhone in boxes.. I suspect that once I've opened it on the iMac, something signals for a removal in the other devices in box.

Yet if I open an email addressed to my iCloud address on my iPad, it will still appear on my iMac.

Thus I cannot rely exclusively on my iCloud email address to receive mail. It's fine for sending. I have held on to using my old EarthLink POP email addresses to be sure I can "see" relevant email from particular recipients on any of my devices. I cannot depend on the iCloud address to put a response or new email to me into every devices' mailbox.

Have asked geeks at my user group. They initially thought it was a hangover from Mobile Me peculiarities. No one has an answer yet, saying "must be something in how it is setup...". Could it be simply keeping my old me.com address?

Check your settings in the email application on the iMac. It would appear to be set to remove the email from the server upon download (and consequently it isn't available to,down load to one of the other devices). This should be an account specific setting, I beleive. I don't currently use the Apple Mail app on my MBP, but you should be able to find the instructions here:

http://www.apple.com/support/mail/

I'd like to reopen this discussion. I could not find any account specific setting in my apple Mail app on my iMac to deal with the problem of lack of distribution of emails sent to my iCloud address ACROSS ALL OF MY Apple devices -- iMAC, iPAD, and iPhone. The problem is such emails will appear on my iMac, but not to the iPad or iPhone devices if I have opened the email on the iMac. They disappear.

This same problem is now reported by another user when I sent her an email to just her iCloud address. Usually I send to both her iCloud address and her Yahoo address to be sure she "sees" the email regardless of the device.

In response to my sending an email to only her iCloud address she responded:

"I just experienced that lapse in iCloud email coverage when it spans multiple devices. I've got two laptops open right now, plus my iPhone. One laptop (the one I'm using now) got your message below. Neither my other laptop nor my iPhone got the message below. This is a real problem. Now I'm going to have to look into this -- how aggravating! There doesn't seem to be this problem with my yahoo account. Stupid iCloud account."

I had told her that IMAP systems distribute email out from one source (server) to the iCloud address, and then seem to remove an email when it is "received" by one device. POP3 systems are older and rely on a single point to a single point distribution, and thus always send to every device calling for email, and hold it on their server for the period of time I specify.

I cannot find anything that allows one to specify to iCloud to distribute to all devices calling for iCloud mail, not just the first one that calls for it.

Check the account settings on the iOS devices for the mail account in question to see if you have it set to Push or Fetch and what the update frequency is. Other than that, not sure what to tell you. Both of my IMAP accounts are working fine ( one is an iCloud account).

This article may help:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4083

My iOS devices have been set to "Fetch".

The issue here is once the iMac has "fetched" an email coming to my iCloud address, the iOS devices, set to fetch, do not get that email. Does your iCloud email come to all your devices, and are your devices set to "Push"?

If you are using Fetch, it is also important to note the interval. I use Manual, meaning I only get new mail when I pull down an release on the mail box (or initially open the Mail app). But I have used Push in the past on all three accounts with no problem.

Thank you!

I decided to look more closely at which incoming messages to me.com "disappear" and which ones do not. There are some incoming messages from major listservs (Wall Street Journal for example) that go "me.com" on all three devices. And the same goes for most other listservers, but not all (two emails from a listserv of the Institute of Education Sciences at the US Dept. of Ed. went only to iMac, not iPad, not iPhone). Also true for an email from an HHS employee-- went to iPhone and iPad; not iMac. And an email from a gmail address first came in to both my POP email address and my me.com address on the iPad, but within minutes the deposit for the me.com address had disappeared from the iPad, and most likely from the iPhone. Later inspection found that email "stayed" only on the iMac.

I will have to collect more of this kind of data. It appears to a problem related to not only how iCloud operates with me.com addresses, but how other email systems are set up to send. The only explanation I've had from a knowledeable person who works on networks, servers, etc. was the basic distinction between POP3 operations and IMAP operations. But I think there must be differences on both the receiving and the sending ends that account for these seeming discrepancies. The main thing is I always get all incoming emails sent to my POP3 address. I get unexplainable reception patterns (whether all three Apple devices receive or which one receives or not) for incoming emails sent to my Apple IMAP email address. The problem is one has to keep looking across all three devices because of the unpredictable patterns associated with mail send to the IMAP address.

I will continue to research this, and try using "Push" setting for Mail on all three devices to see if that regularly delivers to all three devices.

Another thing to try will be to switch to icloud.com instead of me.com and see if that gets rid of the problem.

Both the @icloud.com and the @me.com should work (they should be aliases of the same account), but it might be worth trying that.