How do I get my work POP3 account at home to have the same content (emails) as my work computer in Outlook?

November 2, 2008 5:09 PM

How do I get my work POP3 account at home to have the same content (emails) as my work computer in Outlook?

Here is the situation. I have a POP3 account that I use for work. I am using Outlook for all purposes.

At work I use my POP3 account from my webhost. After I read messages, I delete those I no longer have any use for. For example, at work I have 43 emails in my Inbox and folders called "Followup" and "Important". When I SEND/RECEIVE, all the deleted messages disappear from Outlook when I use it at work.

At home, it appears that no message has ever been deleted. At home I have 973 emails in my Outlook Inbox and no folders called "Followup" and "Important".

How can I make my Outlook at home look like my Outlook at work?

Here are my Outlook settings... they are the same at work as they are at home:

Account Type: POP 3
Logon with SPA: OFF
Outgoing SMTP: Same settings as incoming mail server
Leave a copy of messages on the server: YES
Remove from server after X days: OFF
Remove from server when deleted from "Deleted Items": YES

I will be standing by to provide any additional information.

Thanks in advance.

posted by Mr_Crazyhorse to computers & internet (6 answers total)

Simple answer is that you cant. You will need IMAP email for that. I also have POP3 email and this is what I do to maintain the same emails at work and home.

My computer at work is the master computer and has all my email since 1999. I exported all those emails (including folder structure) to the laptop at some point. This includes all the mail rules that sort emails into respective folders as they come in.

At work, my client is set to delete messages 7 days after download. I do this because I will most certainly check email on my laptop before then [you can set that to whatever you want]. My laptop is set to check but never delete mail from server [this is because I sometimes travel for extended periods of time and need the email to remain on the server for when I get back to the office].

My work computer bcc's all sent email to a particular gmail account (e.g. work_sent_mail@gmail...)

My laptop is set to bcc every sent mail to something similar (laptop_sent_mail@gmail...)

Work computer will automatically check laptop_sent_mail and mark that read and move it to the sent folder. Laptop does the same with work_sent_mail.

Thus both computers have the exact same emails all the time.
posted by special-k at 5:21 PM on November 2, 2008

Exchange is an email system designed to solve this problem, and IMAP works as well. Most webhosts will allow you to switch between IMAP and POP, and you might even have both available to you already. I'd try setting your home email up as an IMAP account and see if it works.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 5:38 PM on November 2, 2008

Another vote for IMAP. I create folders on the site of my email provider (Fastmail). These folders appear on my PC, Mac, and iPhone and are always in sync. For example, if I read a message on my Mac and move it into a folder, it will be in that folder when I check mail on my PC. The same goes for read mail, deleted mail, etc. The initial setup procedure was a little confusing but my email is wonderful now.
posted by PatoPata at 6:27 PM on November 2, 2008

I use Lunarpages.

I will check with them tomorrow regarding IMAP support.
posted by Mr_Crazyhorse at 7:04 PM on November 2, 2008

If you can just use IMAP everywhere, do that. If the only remote access you have to your work's mailbox is via POP3, set up a Gmail account, add your work email to the Gmail account as an additional mail address, tell Gmail to pull mails from it via POP3, and reconfigure your work Outlook and your home Outlook to get at your Gmail account via IMAP.
posted by flabdablet at 1:52 AM on November 3, 2008

Using Gmail as an intermediary in this way also gives you good access to your mail via any web browser when you're on the road, complete with the entire folder structure you've set up in any IMAP clients you've connected to it.
posted by flabdablet at 1:54 AM on November 3, 2008