E-mail question

[BCRose]

I want to receive email on my iPhone when I am travelling but do the majority of email on my iMac.
How do I set up my iPhone to only receive messages that have not already been received on my iMac?
Problem is that if I do not use email on the iPhone for a week or two I will have hundreds of waiting messages when I log in. All that have been previously read on the iMac.

There must be an easy solution for this but I have yet to find it. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

.

 

[chscag]

You didn't mention who your ISP is, however, if they offer the IMAP protocol in addition to PoP mail, you should setup your mail account using IMAP. Then all mail read on your Mac will not be re-downloaded again to your iPhone or iPad but will show up as read. And, vice-versa.

 

[BCRose]

You didn't mention who your ISP is, however, if they offer the IMAP protocol in addition to PoP mail, you should setup your mail account using IMAP. Then all mail read on your Mac will not be re-downloaded again to your iPhone or iPad but will show up as read. And, vice-versa.

Thanks for that info. I will look into changing that.
I use Telus for an ISP. Big here in Canada but probably unknown in your parts.

 

[chas_m]

You could set up an iCloud account, that is IMAP. GMail is IMAP. I believe Yahoo has also changed to IMAP.

Without getting into a long explanation, IMAP is for people who need to sync mail (and that mail's status) automatically on multiple devices. POP is for people who tend to check their mail only on one device.

In IMAP, by default all mail is stored on a server (usually the service provider, ie Google or Apple). It can also be set so that once an email is filed in a folder (out of the inbox), it is removed from the server if you want. Most people don't bother, since they have more space available than they could burn up in years on end, and in any event can archive their old email on their local machine if they wish.