vanishing email

Hi,
I have an iphone 5 and I'm using a pop email account. It has worked great since setting up the phone. Over the weekend all the emails on the phone only were deleted, not by anything I consciously did. The emails remain on my MBP.

I currently use icloud to back-up reminders, calendar, contacts documents and data. Not email. I haven't set up an icloud email address yet.

My question is this: Without backing up all my emails from the POP account to icloud is there a way to back up the important emails that I need access to when traveling? Should I set up an icloud email account and forward the selected emails to icloud?

I like to keep things simple and easy to use since I'm a bit of a techno dinosaur so any ideas to help clarify my options regarding this will be appreciated.

thanks,
chris

First and foremost, if your e-mail providers supports IMAP, you should switch over to that immediately. POP, unless particular configured otherwise, will download email from the server and delete the copy from the server. So you only have a single copy on each client that accesses the email. SO if you want to see emails on both the iPhone and MBP, if both are using POP, then whichever device got there first would get the email and other would not.

You can configure the clients to "Leave a copy on the server" allowing others to get copies as well, but then you have to configure every client to do this.

IMAP, inherently does this and every client gets a copy of the email. And read/unread status is kept across all devices, additionally, deleting an email from one client will ensure that it is deleted on other clients as well..