Gmail settings

Hi there. I am using the mail client that came with my iPad 2 and all seems to be working well. Only thing is, I use pop 3 on my laptop, and thus, when I get home at night I download the gmail emails with outlook express onto my laptop.

The problem that I have is that I want to get/receive the gmail emails on my iPad, but I want to keep them unread in my gmail inbox, so that I can download them to my laptop once a day. If they are opened/read in the gmail inbox, outlook won't download them, so I need to keep the mails as unread on gmail. Any suggestions or help?

I also notice that when I sign into my gmail email account, there is not nearly as much settings as normal, under the settings tab, in fact the only settings I see is for a holiday responder and signature, any thoughts?

All help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Change the laptop's account to IMAP as well.

Then anything you leave in your inbox on the iPad will still show up in the inbox on the laptop. If they are important, use the flag ability to mark them on the iPad. I'm pretty sure Outlook will recognize and flag them on the laptop.

This will also let you create and share folders on the server, making those available on both the laptop and iPad. This helps if your inbox tends to get crowded, since you can move files into a folder on the iPad and then open them later on the laptop.

Best not to even try to mix POP and IMAP accounts. Easier to make some small modifications on how you handle your email traffic.