When I delete a message on my iphone it deletes it on my server. I just want to remove messages from my phone that I don't need on the phone to save memory on the phone. Is there a way to do this?
iPhone 4S, iOS 6.1.3
If your email is an IMAP or Exchange account, you can't do this - the phone merely mirrors the server. When you "delete" the email on the phone it gets moved to the trash folder on the server.
If your email is a POP account:
Settings > Mail.... > your account > Advanced > Incoming Settings - Delete from Server > Never
Note that this setting doesn't work with many POP servers and risks re-downloading deleted emails to the inbox on your phone.
If your email is an IMAP or Exchange account, you can't do this - the phone merely mirrors the server. When you "delete" the email on the phone it gets moved to the trash folder on the server.
If your email is a POP account:
Settings > Mail.... > your account > Advanced > Incoming Settings - Delete from Server > Never
Note that this setting doesn't work with many POP servers and risks re-downloading deleted emails to the inbox on your phone.
What kind of email account do you have? POP? IMAP? Exchange? POP will allow you to delete email on the phone but not the server. IMAP and Exchange are designed to keep all devices in sync. With an Exchange account, you can also specify how many days worth of email to sync to the phone. Settings>Mail, Contacts, Calendar><email account>Mail Days to Sync.
For what it's worth, unless the emails have pictures or other attachments, they take up very little space. The average 1 page email is about 1 kilobyte. There are 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte and 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte. That works out to 1,048,576 kilobytes in a gigabyte. Email is probably not taking up much space on your phone.
No. IMAP is supposed to work like this.
You can limit to 50 e-mails in
Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Show > 50 Recent Messages.
Dear modular,
This is the first attempt to describe what IMAP does that has made any sense to me.
My ISP recently changed its mail system and for a while its POP segment wasn't working -- and I've always deleted messages from my iPhone in hope of reducing the clutter. I was mystified when I re-did my iPhone mail as IMAP and after some weeks discovered that I wasn't getting about half my mail! And more so when I couldn't find the option to never delete from server (...'It was just here a minute ago...'
I would far rather take a chance on removing deleted inconsequential emails from my phone than face the certainty of losing emails vital to my existence as a business!
Who was it who first said "If you really understand it you can explain it simply" -- or conversely, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it?" (Probably Moses, but Feynman comes to mind... and now Mr or Ms modular...)
Want to delete email only on the iphone
