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.


Freedom is never free....thank a Service member today.