Getting email and calender to sync to iMac like it does with iPad and iPhone

Ok here is the problem we currently have a bigpond email account (Australia) and also use calendar associated with that email address and this has been working fine for well over 14 months. Earlier this year we got a iphone 5 and also set up the email and calendar on that device so that the 2 devices synched and they do no problems. The 2 devices are logged into iCloud.

Note both devices required the setting up of email using the Hotmail option to take advantage of the new infrastructure Bigpond have with Microsoft Live.

About a month ago we replaced our old PC with a new iMac. When setting up the iMac we have set up the bigpond email and also logged that iMac into icloud using the same ID as the other two devices. When setting up the email it was noticably different in that the hotmail option to set up the account didnt exist but anyway I got the email account set up regardless and emails are working. Calender entries on the other hand are not. I dont seem to be able to get the calendar entries that synch across iPad and iPhone to sync with the iMac.

We cannot also get folders within email to sych across the devices either. I believe that this has something to do with POP vs IMAP ????.

I really would like to get email and calendar to sync across all 3 devices using the bigpond email address.

I spoke with Apple without much luck as they seemed to believe that bigpond email is using POP and thus cant synch folders across devices and couldnt help me with the calendar not synching across the devices.

Can anyone help me ? Point me in the direction of useful links ?