iphone keeps re-downloading emails

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Thu, 30 Dec 2010, Paul Douglas Franklin wrote:

> Our director's iphone keeps re-downloading emails--thousands of them.  
> He deletes them off and they come back, sometimes months later.  I 
> checked in his account.  

Do we presume he's using IMAP or is it POP3 by any chance?  This kind of
thing sounds rather like POP3.

> He does indeed have thousands of read emails sitting there.  He wants
> them so he can view them on his desktop.  Is anyone familiar with this?

On IMAP you view mails on the server and it's perfectly normal for them to
be there -- unless you delete them, in which case they should disappear off
both the server and client.  On POP3, you download a copy of the mail to
the client.  Depending on how it's set up, the server copy may be deleted
or remain.  Deleting on the client simply deletes the client's copy, the
server copy (if it's still there) will remain.

If you are using IMAP and emails are not being deleted from the server,
something isn't right.  It might be as simple as they get flagged for
deletion but the expunge isn't happening.  However, you'd expect they
wouldn't become visible again -- except as deleted mails.

Gavin