HT204093: Use Mail on your Mac

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Lowell Lewis
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Q: Which email suppliers work most transparently with Apple mail?

We've had problems connecting to comcast overseas.  So switched to gmail but have had problems inadvertently deleting emails from the gmail server and all other devices whenever we access them on any of our 5 Apple devices.  We want emails to stay on the server unless they are deleted by the MacBook Pro, our primary device, but stay on the server when read or deleted from the iPhones, iPad or iMac.

 

13-inch mid-2009 MBP running OS X Yosemite v 10.10.2

2.53 GHz Intel processor

8 GB memory

249 GB disk storage with 40 GB available

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Mar 21, 2015 5:29 PM

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Lowell Lewis

Q: Which email suppliers work most transparently with Apple mail?

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  • by Linc Davis,Helpful

    Linc Davis Linc Davis Mar 21, 2015 10:00 PM in response to Lowell Lewis
    Level 10 (208,037 points)
    Applications
    Mar 21, 2015 10:00 PM in response to Lowell Lewis

    iCloud Mail is the easiest to set up.

  • by Lowell Lewis,

    Lowell Lewis Lowell Lewis Mar 22, 2015 11:03 AM in response to Linc Davis
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Mar 22, 2015 11:03 AM in response to Linc Davis

    Thanks.  I have  iCloud email set up but I'll do some more reading on this. 

    My main problem has to do with our travels, when we typically take iPhones, iPad and the MBP.  My desire is to set the MBP as the primary machine for emails such that, when I delete an email from the MBP, it deletes the email from the server, whether comcast, gmail, iCloud or whoever is set as our email provider.  I don't want another Apple device to delete mail from the server after I read it on that device and I don't want the previously deleted emails from the server by the MBP to show up when I subsequently check emails on the other Apple devices. 

    Is this something that can be set with iCloud.  I'm having problems doing this with gmail, thus this question.

    Thanks

  • by William Lloyd,Helpful

    William Lloyd William Lloyd Mar 22, 2015 11:10 AM in response to Lowell Lewis
    Level 7 (21,183 points)
    Mar 22, 2015 11:10 AM in response to Lowell Lewis

    Do you understand the difference between IMAP and POP? Knowing this is critically important.

     

    With IMAP, everything behaves the same everywhere. If you delete an email from one place, it will be deleted on all devices. If you move an email to a folder on one device, all other machines will see the move, because everything is done on the mail servers.

     

    With POP, it's a mess. There are no server-side folders, and whether something stays on the server depends on the POP settings you have set up. Synchronizing devices using POP is basically impossible. Most ISPs (likely Comcast), offer up POP as the default, so it's a real mess.

     

    Gmail gives an IMAP interface, HOWEVER it is nonstandard and can behave strangely (i.e. deleting doesn't always TRULY delete), and they don't have folders, they use labels which are different because an email can have 10 labels and Gmail will make it look like the same email is actually in 10 different folders, which confuses mail clients like Mail on OS X and iOS.

     

    Summing up: iCloud is a good mail server for IMAP. It works well. If you want Gmail and Comcast to behave as you want, you have a lot of tinkering and work ahead of you.

  • by Linc Davis,

    Linc Davis Linc Davis Mar 22, 2015 12:00 PM in response to Lowell Lewis
    Level 10 (208,037 points)
    Applications
    Mar 22, 2015 12:00 PM in response to Lowell Lewis

    There is an account setting under Mailbox Behaviors to delete messages from the server after a delay.