Is this the only way to get my email account that is accessed through Outlook to my iPhone? Or do you iPhone users recommend a different method?

urgh explain a bit more. I doubt it just add another mailbox (probably exchange to your mail)

Who provides your email service?

Virgin, I then have that sent to my Outlook on the home computer.

If your virgin account is IMAP (or can be set up as IMAP) then thats all thats required. You don’t need to add another mailbox the account will be sycronised on whatever device you use with it

I’ve got two accounts on my iPhone, an O2 one and a BT Internet one; you can keep adding them AFAIK.

Log into your email on the Virgin website. Go to the Inbox and click on “Settings” in the top right corner. Then click on the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab. At the bottom of the settings there are a couple of radio buttons in the “IMAP Access”, set those to ‘Enabled”.

Then click on the link below that says “Configuration Instructions” and find the instructions for configuring both Outlook (which is likely to be currently set up using POP3) and your iPhone. Ignore the bit about Virgin not supporting devices other than the couple listed. The service is actually provided by Google Mail and their site contains a lot more information about device configuration…

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=75726

Once both are correctly set up using IMAP, both devices will be able to access the email account, and changes made on one device will be reflected on the other. E.g., marking and email read on the phone will mark it read on Outlook, deleting an email in Outlook will delete it on the phone.