Oh wow, I never expected such great responses!

You have all answered my questions!

I now know why I was using POP instead of IMAP.

Yesterday, I had to rebuild my Pre from scratch and I set up the email the way the Pre wanted, which meant that several email accounts went IMAP.

My original setup on the Pre was to manually make all of them POP.

This time I wanted to ask the question because somehow I knew there was a special reason why I liked and was using POP most of the time.

IMAP is great if you don't need to re-read the messages across multiple computers. And most of the mail is generally kept on the server. Such as AOL's IMAP feature.

However, on my home pc, I had setup my Road Runner account originally as POP (I think that's all they offered).

I also liked having the email stored on my pc at home, where I am responsible for keeping it in good shape and backing it up and saving what I wanted to save.

And because I use several computers, I used to have my main computer 'remove messages from server' when I used that computer. Hence, my Treo (what I used to have) could not receive mail during the day if I left my home computer on all day (which I did).

And I was generally happy with this.

Now with the Pre and all this 'synergy stuff', I decided to let the Pre be useful during the day and receive the email.

I switched the options on my home computer to 'leave messages on server, until deleted'. With this setting, I am able to receive the same email on all computers/phones.

But it does mean more housekeeping. A message that I read on my Pre, is still listed as 'unread' on my home pc when I get home. So I have to do more clean up work.

However, in the end, my messages are stored on my home pc and removed from the server.

I did set the option on the Pre to 'sync deleted email' to be 'ON'!

So if I delete the message off the Pre, I should not get it at home, but for some reason, I am getting all the messages at home.

I think this is happening, because my home PC is checking mail about every 15 minutes, whereas on the Pre, I have it set to check my email every hour.

I am so glad for all the opinions and suggestions.

It turns out in the end, it all depends on what you are doing and how you want to use your email accounts.

I think in my case, I am a POP person and willl be going back to POP on the few accounts that got setup as IMAP.

If as a personal user, Microsoft made a cheap, home exchange server, that might be something that would be the best of out of everything.

But right now, to run a MS Exchange Server from you house, is expensive (if you are not able to or willing to use a hot copy) and your ISP might not like you doing that. Remember, most home users do not have static IP addresses, so getting a domain name associated with dynamic IP is really impossible to do. (Unless, my knowledge of this is wrong).

Again, that you for a very interesting and informative discussion!

Rob

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