Configure iPhone or iPad for SWCP Email

There are several ways configure your iPhone for email. The following describes the method that works best with SWCP's mail servers.

Use IMAP, not POP

If you will be accessing your mailbox from multiple locations at the same time, IMAP works better than POP. Remember that if your desktop computer is configured to check for mail every 10 minutes, and you are out and about checking mail on your iphone, there will be times when your phone and computer try to hit the mailbox at the same time. IMAP supports this, but POP does not.

Deleting Messages

In the iphone mail setup you have these options to affect how messages are deleted (these are under Advanced settings for the mailbox account):

"Deleted mailbox" - can be "On My iPhone" or a named folder on the server. If it's "On My iPhone" the deleted messages get copied to a folder named Trash on your phone. DO NOT USE THIS OPTION.

If "Deleted Mailbox" is set to a folder on the server (e.g. "Deleted Messages") then when you delete a message from any folder it gets COPIED to the "Deleted Messages" folder, *and* marked as "deleted" in the original folder.

When you go into the INBOX or other folders with your desktop client or webmail, the messages you deleted from the iphone will still be visible there, but marked "deleted". If you "Empty Trash" they'll get really deleted from the folder. A copy of them will still be in the "Deleted Messages" folder.

There's one more important setting on the iPhone, the "Remove" setting which can be "After one day", "week", or "month". This controls how long the iPhone will leave messages in the "Deleted Messages" folder. "1 week" is a good setting. Every time you check mail from the iPhone, it nukes messages older than a week from the "Deleted Messages" folder. If you get a lot of large email attachments and delete from the iPhone, this could be a problem because of the disk space needed for the "Deleted Messages" folder. You could use a shorter period (1 day), or buy more disk space, or just resist the urge to delete those messages from the iphone.

Oh, one more thing: in order to select the "Deleted Messages" folder in the advanced settings, the folder had to be created ahead of time. You can create the folder in webmail, or using the IMAP client on your desktop computer (Thunderbird, mail.app, Outlook, etc.)