Home Forums Networks & Cross-Platform Networking Switching three devices to IMAP mail

MBP, iPad and Android phone. Where do I start? Do I have to delete the accounts from each device first?

And, let's say I want to keep certain messages on MacMail but delete from my phone, how do I do that without going to the Mac? If I don't set up IMAP, then I have to bcc everything I send from my phone or iPad back to myself, right?

If by MacMail means the Apple email application that ships with OS X and iOS and those accounts are POP the easiest, and perhaps only, way of saving the messages would be to do it on the Mac. In fact I am not even sure it would be possible to do on the iPad and you are on your own where the Android phone is concerned.

On the Mac using the Apple Mail application you would go to Mailbox > New Mailbox, select On My Mac as the location and define a name for the mailbox then move the messages you want to save to the On My Mac mailboxe(es). Since On My Mac mailboxes are not associated with any email account you could then safely delete or change the accounts without losing the messages. However that does mean you would have to move everything to the Mac. Forwarding the messages from your other devices to the Mac is probably the easiest way to get them there. I'm not sure how your Bcc would even work.

NOTE: If you do go to IMAP accounts there is no way to keep some messages on one device and not the others except for messages you have moved to an On My Mac mailbox.


In older versions of the Apple Mail application it was possible to change an account from POP to IMAP or vice versa if the incoming mail server URL remained the same but in the current releases it is not easy to even create a POP account much less change an account from POP to IMAP or vice-versa. IMO the easiest way to go would be to delete the POP accounts and create new IMAP accounts.

FWIW I have my Mac, iPad, and iPhone set to synch Mail via iCloud. That means the Mail setup not the messages. So when I setup or change email on my Mac, that automatically changes the two iOS devices.

Let's start with the basics.....

The key difference between IMAP and POP is that ALL email resides on the server (with minor variations depending on how you set your client preferences) with IMAP.

.....whereas, ALL mail that transits a POP server comes OFF the server as soon as you touch it with your email client on your device....and it lives ONLY on your device once delivered, i.e., anything Sent from that account will only be retained on the device from which it was sent, anything received from that account will only be retained on the device that accessed that account.

So let's run an example: you have three separate POP email accounts -- none of that mail lives on any other device once you access the account from any of your devices...account A can be accessed from any of your devices, but any email that you touch from that device is lost to any of your other devices unless you manually re-send it. Same applies to the other two POP accounts.....

To consolidate all your emails to a single IMAP account would require you forward everything you wanted to consolidate from each of your POP accounts....once on the IMAP server, ALL of that email can be accessed from ANY of your devices equally without affecting the other devices. If you delete an email from that account from any of your devices, that email is deleted for ALL your devices.

Those are the basics, and with some additional configuration you can adjust things so that you can have an additional "Retain" IMAP mailbox that instead of throwing an email into the Trash and having it go away for all your different devices you can put it into this Retain box and have it filed for access at a later time by any of your devices.

I hope that viewing this issue from the server perspective rather than from the device perspective helps to clarify your next actions.....we can talk about having multiple IMAP accounts that your email client can access simultaneously at a later time.

Just to give you some hope that it's not all that hard, I have three separate IMAP mail accounts (.mac, gmail, and my local ISP) that I access from my computer(s) using the Mail client application under OS X, my iPad and my iPhone using the Mail app under IOS....and when I receive an email on ANY of those three accounts, I get notification on ALL my devices and can access that email from ANY of those devices without any bleed-over or cross-talk to either of the other email accounts.

Am I misunderstanding something?

I've got three POP accounts, and as far as I've ever been able to tell their default behavior is to retain all mail received until I delete it from my server either manually or automatically via a Mail > Prefs > Advanced option.

In fact, I frequently use my POP accounts to store mail that I've already d/l'ed.

Sounds to me Artie as if at some point in the past you manually re-configured the default preferences in Mail to leave the emails on your POP server.....most POP accounts limit the amount of data that they will retain to manage server space and therefore the default behavior they would expect is for emails to NOT be retained.

The default behavior for POP accounts is to delete the message from the server when it is fetched by the email client. However, there is an option to leave the message on the server. In Mail 9 that option is in Mail > Preferences > Accounts > Advanced.

In case your provider is EarthLink, see this Support Center article:
EarthLink IMAP Setup. Last updated on January 22, 2016.

You've got that option backwards.

Edit: That said, I recently read somewhere that Apple removed the option to delete mail from your server in OS X 10.11.2, and, indeed, the option I depicted seems not to be working, although I can still delete emails from my server via control-clicking on Mail > Sidebar > Inbox > Get Account Info.

I can speak only for my own situation...


Edit: And if I were to theorize that all POP providers acted similarly, I'd be supported by the Mail option referenced in my response to joemike.

I think in this case theorizing would be equivalent to assume. It is far more likely each ISP would have unique POP retention policies.

And, of course, the option in reverse wouldn't be of any use, because Apple can't overcome an ISP's retention policy.

Edit: I'm slow on the uptake (for a change ) today. By definition, a theory can't be an assumption. (An assumption is far more likely to get you into trouble than is a theory.)

I clearly remember a few people telling me what happens when you ASSUME

I clearly remember it happening!