iPhone 3G[s]

[Burble]

Originally Posted by Vertigo1

If all your devices are using IMAP then surely your email stays on the IMAP server at your provider/ISP? Does it ever get downloaded to your PC for long-term storage?

Yep, if that's what you tell the client to do. In Thunderbird it's referred to as offline email. you subscribe to the folders that you want available offline and then Thunderbird will download them.

That's the problem I've been having with the beta of 3.0 though (I'm using 3.0 because it can use the system address book in OS X), it will take a few attempts at synchronising before TB updates the server with emails that have been moved, deleted and so on.

Originally Posted by Vertigo1

Another question is spam. I currently use Outlook via POP3 and have In-boxer installed which does a stunning job of spam filtering but it's obviously done client-side. I'm concerned that if I access my provider's POP3/IMAP server directly from an iPhone I'll end up getting swamped with spam. I've never had much joy with hosted anti-spam systems like SpamAssassin as they usually seem to end up binning genuine emails accidentally.

If you're running a client side spam package then yes, you would get all the crap on the iPhone. The way around that is to leave your PC turned on and your email client open. That way the client downloads the email, removes the crap and leaves clean email on the server.

SpamAssassin is a very clever package but it's not all that easy to get it setup properly. It's most often setup issues that cause it to tag/bin legitimate emails.

Originally Posted by Vertigo1

Not sure what the best system would be

IMAP I'd say.