iPhone Mail: make read messages sync

jasfa131

The Lone Deranger
How can I get the emails I've read on my Mac be synced to my phone as read. It annoying having 77 'unread' messages or have to reread them all.

Thanks!
 
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IMAP is the only "pure" way to do this. Using POP accounts, this is either impossible or insanely complex to do.

The reason it's damn near impossible is that POP messages reside on your device, rather than on the server as with IMAP. When you download and read a message from a POP account on a certain device, how are all the other devices supposed to "know" that you read it on a different device if they have no server to tell them such?

Think of POP like a newspaper -- you get it on your front doorstep, open it, and begin reading. As you read, you dog-ear the pages you're done reading. Then, you go over to your friend's house and he also has received the paper -- but none of the pages are dog-eared! POP works similarly -- multiple, independent copies of a newspaper.

IMAP, on the other hand, is like reading articles online. You log into the Wall Street Journal web page and begin reading articles. When you go to your friend's house, you hop on his computer, log in (using your credentials) to the WSJ web site, and the server "knows" which articles you've read and which you haven't read.

I suggest strongly switching those POP accounts to IMAP accounts, if at all possible. The way I've worked around this for my last two or three remaining POP accounts is to set up a gmail account using IMAP, then having gmail check those POP accounts and download the messages into my gmail account. You can even set it up so that when you reply to a message with gmail for a message from a POP account, the outgoing message appears to be coming from the POP account (instead of the gmail account).
 
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