POP3 syncing across devices?

POP3 does not sync across devices. You need an IMAP account.

 

POP3 downloads the messages to your machine. since they're no longer on the mail server, then they can't sync with anything else....

 

I kind of simulated that half way:
One machine was the "lead" with the full history of my mails in POP3; on other devices I configured the mail client in a way not to delete from server.
This way you could until the lead system downloaded the POP3 mails see them on all devices.

To be clear: that's really an emergency solution and I replaced it with an IMAP setup on my own domain. But if you don't have IMAP it might help

 

There are some options.
In the advanced settings of my POP3 account it does offer :
Leave a copy of each message on server - checkbox yes/no
Delete copies from the server - After Deleting From This Computer/Never/After One Day/Week/Month.

So you can see the same emails on different machines - I can on my MBA and my iPad.
BUT there is no automatic synching between devices - you have to do this yourself.

What I used to do was to look at the day's emails on my iPad and then manage them on my MBA. This got to be a pain so I only look at my POP3 emails on the MBA and let my iCloud account IMAP emails sych automatically. So I have yet to decide whether to use the POP3 account or the iCloud account for all emails.

 

Unless of course you have the option in the mail client to leave the messages on the server

 

You can set the mail program to Leave A Copy on the server for X Number of days. That way what ever computer or other device you have setup to get the mail from a POP account will get the same mail for those X Number of days.