[steenkh]

My wife and I have for many years used POP3 for our email, but we would like to take advantages of IMAP. However, it seems that our requirements makes it impossible, or difficult.

This is the situation: we both have iPhones and iPads, and we have a desktop computer, and a laptop. We also both have full access to each other’s email accounts, and finally, it is an absolute requirement that I can have a complete archive of all mails on the desktop (and laptop).

So far I have set it up using POP3, and on the desktop computer mails on the mail server are deleted after 3 months, whereas on the other computers, mails are never deleted on the mailserver. I have assumed that within three months, mails have been fetched on all units so they can be deleted safely on the mail server.

However that also means that on every computer we need to delete the same spam mails over and over again, and mails that have been read on the iPad will still be marked read on the iPhone.

I am now conducting an experiment where I have setup my iPhone and iPad to use IMAP, whereas all the other units still use POP3. It works fine, except that when one of the POP accounts have pulled mails, these mails are marked read in IMAP so that usually, all my mails seem to be read, which sort of defeats the idea of it all.

Is there another way of setting this up, like is there a way of using IMAP everywhere and still get all mail on the desktop and laptop computers?

I am used to delete mails on my own iPhone and iPad that are of no interest to me, but my wife can still see them, just like she deletes mails that are of no interest to her, but might still be of my interest, and in any case, we can always check on the desktop computer if we have somehow deleted something hat should not be deleted.

Ideally, the synchronisation of read markings should be work on my iPad and iPhone, but be independent of the status on my wife’s iPad and iPhone, but I do realise that this is too much to ask.

I’ll probably have to revert to using POP3 everywhere.