iPad and e-mail

[janek]

Okay, so since i got my ipad in september i have been reading my e-mail on it rather than on my laptop. Today, for possibly the first time since then i downloaded all my gmail to my laptop. As lots of it was just spam/messages from facebook i deleted most of it. I wasn't too particular about what i was doing as there was a lot of it, and i thought it was also saved on my ipad.

However, now the inbox on my ipad is now empty. I am confused as to what is going on. Does this mean that ipad email needs storing on the internet otherwise it just disappears? I can't believe this would be true, but if not then what's going on?

Luckily, all the deleted mail is still in my trash folder on my laptop, so i can rescue what i need, but this is really weird. Can anyone give me some advice please? Tia.

Right, i found my (new) annual travel insurance policy in the spam folder of my ipad, so i moved it to somewhere more appropriate. The next thing i know my laptop beeps and i've received my insurance policy e-mail. And it is no longer in the folder i stored it in on my ipad.

What is going on? Why is this happening? Can i stop it? Help!

On your laptop's mail program you probably have a setting to 'remove all messages from server' ie your laptop will take your email off the server and they are not there anymore to be seen by your iPad. So I would look into your settings on your laptop mail program to set it to 'do not remove messages from server'. This should fix any further messages but I don't think you can it your email back on the server to be seen and managed by your iPad. Hope this helps!

Perhaps you'd let us know what mail software you are using... I'd say to never delete anything important and if you are concerned about the capacity of a tablet getting filled up by e-mail messages, then better to use a browser like Chrome or Firefox and view your e-mail with that, so you'd use the web interface and not 'download' onto the tablet at all, just view.

Have found a number of clients deleting mail "because I have read it" and not thinking about it being deleted from the service (not just GMail) because of their action. Much better to 'Archive' (on GMail) messages you have seen but may need in weeks/months and that way they won't appear in the Inbox, but are still visible with All Mail, and/or add a label so they can be grouped (eg any mail from Tesco / etc having a label of Shops-Tesco added {in your mail filter rules})

I use several GMail accounts with some 60,000 unread items at present, but don't bother downloading mail by default to a local hard drive but print [to a PDF file, on home PC] anything which I do want a copy of 'just in case' GMail were to lose it.

Yes if you delete from server it will be gone. Which is handy cos otherwise you have to delete each email from your ipad as there is no bulk delete option

So my ipad syncs with the server? And if the server is empty then the ipad will be empty? So anything i need to keep on my ipad needs to stay on the googlemail website too?

So is there a way to store e-mails that i do want on my ipad?

And yes, i definitely do have my laptop set to delete messages once they're downloaded. But i had no idea this would mean they were no longer on the ipad.

Bump for more advice!

Tell me!!! Please.

If you delete any messages on gmail from any device they will be deleted from wherever you check them - that is how web-based email works. Just because you have viewed them once on your iPad does not mean that you have downloaded/saved them. Gmail, hotmail, yahoo etc all work this way, which is different from, say, outlook, where messages are actually downloaded to your computer.

It's very easy: if there are any messages on gmail you want to have continued access to, just don't delete them.

One iPad-specific issue is that if you are using the built-in mail app to read gmail, it will be set to show only the most recent 50-1,000 messages (you can go into the main settings screen to see what yours is set to, and change it if necessary) so older messages won't show up even if you haven't deleted them. But if you go into gmail via safari on the iPad, you will still have access to all the old, undeleted messages.

So there's no way to 'save' an e-mail on my ipad, unless it is also on the internet? Might just change that setting on my laptop then!

No, I don't think you can save emails on an iPad unless you actually copy and paste them into a document. Sounds like changing the auto-delete setting on your laptop would be sensible.

I thought the whole point about gmail was that you have virtually unlimited storage and never need to delete things anyway.

You could highlight the text of the email and copy it to a 'notes' page on the iPad. The notes are stored directly on it and available even when not connected to 3G or wifi. I sometimes do this with info that I will need abroad, when I might not have any Internet.

thank you people, i get it now! i was just so flummoxed, it never occurred to me that if i could see it on my ipad it wasn't actually on my ipad, iyswim. but now i know i will never be caught out again.

i do need to delete some stuff otherwise i'd never find anything, but the rest can while away its life on gmail now that i've changed my laptop (that i never use!) settings.