Email purge?

[Melie]

Person(me) owns 2 iPads and an iPhone. When switching among them I occasionally get a mailbox with 100 plus already read emails. Is there a way to batch delete them?

Thanks,
Mark

 

[twerppoet]

Who's your email provider?

This is normal behavior for a POP3 account. Check with your email provider and see if they have an IMAP or Exchange server you can use instead. Those are the best choices for email accounts that are used on multiple devices. Everything is synced back to the server, and will be the same on every device (after it has a moment to sync).

POP accounts, by contrast, just send the emails to your devices. Each device can be set to either delete the emails from the server after download, or keep them on the server. If the device does the first, your other devices never see the emails. If it does the second it's up to each device to remember what emails it has already read and deleted. There is no way for it to communicate that information to your other devices.

This is probably why you are getting inconsistent behavior. One or more of your devices is deleting emails after downloading, and the other's aren't; so depending on what device you download the emails on first you may or may not see them on the other devices.

 

[Melie]

Thank you very much

 

[twerppoet]

No problem. I hope it helps. Please let us know if there is anything else we can do.

Oh yes, on batch deleting. There is a kind of workaround. You'll find it in the second post of this thread: http://www.ipadforums.net/threads/email-oddity-i-know-im-popular-but.126668/

But the best long term solution is to move to an IMAP or Exchange account, if it is feasible.