iOS Mail Client Help Needed

[xiphius]

Hello all,

I am new to both the this forumn and the ipad. I am a long time user of Palm OS and had a Tungsten C for 7 years and recently decided to upgrade by buying an ipad 2 (due to the price drop after the ipad 3 release). One of the main things I use such a device for is email on the go but something is kind of weird with the mail client and I was hoping someone here with greater ipad wisdom might be able to steer me in the right direction.

First, let me start out by saying that my main email account is my university account which is through gmail. The University's IT page had an extensive guide for setting up IMAP for mobile devices which I followed successfully. I then logged in and was able to view and read my email but something strange keeps happening when I try and delete emails. When I hit the delete button, the message disappears and reappears in the trash as would be expected, I can then empty the trash and have the message purged, but when I update my mailbox, all the messages that I deleted via the mail client reappear. For some reason it is deleting the messages out of the mail client but then not deleting them online as well so that every time I update my mailbox, they all come back. This is incredibly annoying as my inbox can quickly become very cluttered with junk and there does not seem to be a way to *really* delete messages from within the iOS mail client. If I want to actually delete messages I have to log in via the website and do it online. This sort of negates the purpose of having a mail client as I need to be able to do more than just view my emails, I need to be able to manage them (delete). In Versa Mail (Palm OS mail client) when I deleted messages it synced the online account accordingly making it so that I rarely, if ever, had to log in from a computer. Is there some setting that I need to change to make it so that deleted messages will not keep reappearing in my mailbox every time I update it? Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

**It might be worth noting that when I log in via a browser online for email and go into my mailbox, the messages that I deleted from my ipad have a little bubble next to them that says "deleted messages" but for some reason are still in the same folder as they were originally and are not definitely not deleted.


Also, on a slightly un-related note, I was wondering if there was any way to delete an individual email from a gmail conversation via the iOS mail client. Whenever I try and delete a single email, it removes the entire conversation, which is not what I want to do. Online this is a fairly straightforward process, but via Mail it seems to be an impossible task.


Thanks in advance to anyone who can help with my issues!

 

[twerppoet]

That is just plain weird.

I can't think of what would cause an IMAP account to act that way. You'll probably have to take the problem to your university's IT staff and work it out with them. I, at least, have not got a clue.

Sorry.

 

[xiphius]

Ok, so I took it to the IT dept today and showed them the problem. They were as stumped as all the rest and basically told me to delete the account and set it up again Even offered to do it for me since it doesn't take that long. Basically when I set it up the first time, I told them that I had selected "other" and then manually inserted the incoming and outgoing mail servers when prompted. When IT set it up, they selected the gmail preset and went from there. For some reason, this worked. I have no idea why it would make any difference, but after deleting the account and setting it back up using the iPad's gmail preset, it now works flawlessly as advertised. Weird, but at least I do not feel too stupid given that no one else can seem to explain it to me either, guess it was just a freak glitch or something. I guess I should have just tried deleting it and setting it back up from the beginning, but I got sidetracked by the fact that it was actively connecting and receiving messages, just not accepting commands to delete/move them. Its fixed now. Thanks to all who looked and gave it some thought.

 

[twerppoet]

I glad you got it worked out.

No telling what the difference was, or it might have just been the deleting and setting up again. It wouldn't be the first time an email problem was solved that way.

 

[joeyteel]

I can explain the reappearing messages. When setup as a standard IMAP account the messages aren't actually purged until the next inbox refresh. If you empty the trash, the iPad forgets it downloaded that message and deleted it so it will redownload it instead of deleting it.

The Gmail preset actually uses the IMAP servers, but it changes the behavior to use the same behavior as Exchange and other push accounts so that it immediately pushes the change back to the server

 

[xiphius]

A good explanation. Thank you. Hopefully this thread will help anyone else who runs into a similar problem.