I’m going on a business trip to Hong Kong.
I currently have 12.5GB of email stored locally via POP3. I can’t afford to sync it all via IMAP.

I’ve just bought a laptop and would like to:
View all new email while in Hong Kong.
If I delete an email – it should be deleted from the server.

When I return to my desktop, I’d like all remaining email to download.

Question:
Can I get my Sent emails from Hong Kong to my desktop without setting up IMAP on the desktop?

If you are using Outlook.

You could export your “sent Items” folder to a pst file. move that over to your Desktop and import them into Outlook on there.

Likely using Thunderbird on both computers.
Maybe there’s an add-on to allow export.

Is there a webmail interface to your POP account? That’s what I use with Plus Net if I want to change stuff without hoovering it off the server.

Yes there is (it’s 1and1), and it’s what I’ve used in the past on iPad/etc.
I could definitely use that to keep it simple. No offline reading though I guess.

Why not just get outlook/thunderbird/whatever running over IMAP? Any decent mail client will download the mail to your computer and only use the IMAP part for updates or searching. I travel with Outlook on my laptop and Mail on my iPhone and there’s no huge data issue.

Just use IMAP. If you’re using Thunderbird, you can configure what does and doesn’t get downloaded automatically, including limiting it to just messages newer than a certain number of days, and also setting which folders get downloaded.

If I’m understanding what you want to do then you just need to setup email on your laptop using IMAP, you’ll get new mail, if you set it up to delete mail from the server when you delete it then it’ll be gone. And then when you get back and pickup your email on your desktop, all the stuff you did via IMAP will download to your POP3 setup client and be removed from the server.

I used to run like this a while ago where I had my phone/iPad/desktop all connecting to email via IMAP and my laptop connecting to the same account via POP3 which meant I could access all my mail anywhere but when I used my laptop I got a local copy and the server got cleared off.. Worked perfectly and I only changed it as I was increasingly needing to get to older emails on somewhere other than my laptop.

My only problem with IMAP on both computers is that if I sync my ‘sent items’ or a couple of other large ones which I refer to all the time), I instantly fill my 2GB server quota. To move to 30GB Quota costs 3.99 every month which seems a bit daft for a service I only benefit from occasionally.

H1ghland3r – yes, as I see it the only thing I would miss is the email I sent while on the laptop.

Last time I used IMAP, you could set it to download headers only (and message bodies on demand) in the client.

Is webmail not an option? Dodges the bullet of email copies completely then.

You should be able to get it to sync sent items down as well, but even if you can’t it’s a simple matter to export them from your laptop onto a flash drive and then import them into your email client on the desktop.. Should take about 3 minutes depending on how big the sent items are while you are away.

cool – I think that’s what I’ll do.
I’ll test it once the laptop has installed 118 updates, then W8.1, then 25 updates, then… …

I currently have 12.5GB of email stored locally via POP3. I can’t afford to sync it all via IMAP.

Change to Gmail? 15Gb for free, 100Gb is $2/month

Might be worth investigating zilog.
Probably after I return though 🙂

Get hold of MailStore (which has a free option) and archive all the old mail. I’d assume you don’t really need access to the majority of 12.5GB of mail 😉 , so archive it off, delete the old stuff locally stored and then go from there. I’d strongly recommend IMAP from then on as it’s all stored on the server and you can set local client to only sync a set date range for offline use.