I have recently changed from Windows Live Mail on Windows 10 to eM Client, and although I like eM Client, I very much miss a feature that WLM has. There it was possible tick a box in the settings that forced deletion of messages from an external mailbox after they were downloaded to my machine. I use an external mailbox on the mail-server of my ISP, where I edit out what I do not want, then only download to my machine what I want to keep. WLM would, on that download, delete the messages from the external mailbox as it downloaded them. But under eM Client, I have to go to the external mailbox and delete them all manually.
This setting is there as well in eM Client but it is for POP3 accounts only. If you added your email account to eM Client using the Automatic Setup, the account will be setup as IMAP, so does not have this feature.
To find out about setting up your account as POP3, please see the Help File (F1).
That’s all very fine, but if the ISP accepts both IMAP and POP3 and eM Client defaults to IMAP it will not pick up that setting from Windows Live Mail when using Automatic Setup. And Automatic Setup is the recommended way of changing over, and thus effectively the default. But why have that facility only in IMAP? When it is not there across the board we only find out after the fact that it’s missing. Very odd. And can it only be selected on setup? Can it be done retrospectively without losing data? It should be something we can select, not something that is selected behind the scenes by the software, but only if we know in advance what it will not be doing.
And my Windows Live Mail was set up in POP3, which eM Client’s Automatic Setup failed to see.
Automatic Setup has nothing to do with any previous email clients, or their settings, that you may have on your computer. If you want to bring your accounts and their settings across from WLM, you can import from that application rather than setting them up yourself (either with Automatic Setup or manual setup).
IMAP does not delete messages from the server after downloading, because it does not actually download from the server. Think of IMAP as the same as a webmail client. All it does is give you a cached view of what is on the server. If you delete a message in webmail, it will be deleted in the IMAP client. If you mark a messages as read in webmail, it will be marked as read in the IMAP client.
You can’t change an account from IMAP to POP3. That is not possible because they are very different. IMAP stores it’s messages on a server and POP3 stores it’s messages on your computer. I gave you the link in my initial comment that takes you to the Help File where you can learn about setting up accounts in the way you wish.
We seem to be talking at cross-purposes. Bringing my accounts and their settings across from WLM, using Automatic Setup, did not work for what I shall call remote deletion. In WLM the remote-deletion option was ticked, and POP3 was selected, but eM Client did not bring those across.
Perhaps we are talking about different serves. By remote server I mean the mail server on my ISP. If you mean the same, I do not understand this–‘If you delete a message in webmail, it will be deleted in the IMAP client. If you mark a messages as read in webmail, it will be marked as read in the IMAP client’–because I have not seen that happen. But I mark everything as read in the server before I download, and delete whatever I don’t want, so perhaps that would be why, because what I do in the server masks what eM Client might do. But I am sure that eM Client could delete the messages in the server. Being a computerist of a very old school I firmly believe in SMOP–‘Small Matter of Programming.’ It would only be sending an instruction…
I’ve just tested the effect at the server of marking as read or deleting in eM Client, and there is none as I thought–certainly no deletion, and items not marked as read showed as read in the server after downloading. Very odd…
Yes, Automatic Setup does not bring accounts across from other applications. That is not it’s purpose. For that you need to use the import function.
Open two tabs in your web browser. Connect to the same webmail in both. Delete a message in the one tab. Go to the other tab and you will see that the message is gone as well. So an IMAP email client is exactly the same in this respect to webmail. If you delete the message using your webmail interface, and then you open the IMAP email client, the message is also deleted. That is IMAP.
None of that is helpful. That means that that corner of the software of the world works for computers not people.
If I take a letter from my letterbox and put it on my kitchen table it is no longer in my letterbox. If take it from my letterbox and put in the rubbish-bin it never reaches my kitchen. That is the real world, and good software always emulates the real world, the world of people; it does not arrange itself for the contrived ‘needs’ of electrons.
When I was an MIS manager I had a programmer who was friendly with electrons, not people. He needed to change that round, and when at last he did he exclaimed, ‘It was a revelation!’, and he began to write software for people, real people, not machines.
It seems that this software is never going to find that revelation, so the only way of fixing my situation is to waste my time dumping the IMAP face and restarting the whole thing and hope to force it to POP3, hope I can get my data back the way it is now.
I took a systems-engineering course in San Antonio long ago, and the people in that company said, ‘We subscribe to the rigour theory. If a programmer has to put in more effort, more rigour, to save time for people and make it easier for them, he does it. He doesn’t leave it, and thus force people to accommodate the shortcomings.’ When workarounds are made necessary the programmers have failed.
Yes, you do not understand. Sorry.
IMAP and POP3 are NOT the same.
POP3 will download messages from the server, and you can choose to leave them on the server, or delete them from the server afterwards. This is what you used in your other email application.
IMAP is just the same as webmail. It is just showing you what is on the server. So this is like a CCTV camera showing you what is somewhere else. There is no option to delete from the server after downloading because it is NOT downloading from the server. Just the same as your webmail. There is no option to delete from the server after downloading when using webmail, because it is not downloading anything. You are simply viewing the messages remotely. This is the same for webmail and IMAP.
Does that make sense?
I guess you are a computerist of a school before IMAP was invented. 
That is OK.
Please remove all accounts from eM Client. Go to Menu > File > Import > WLM and import your settings and data from that application. The accounts will be setup as POP3.
DO NOT use eM Client’s Automatic Setup. That does not import anything from any other applications on your computer. It simply sets up your account using IMAP. That is all. Nothing to do with what was in WLM. Nothing AT ALL.
Thank you for that, but that is easier to say than do. I have now been using eM Client for long enough to have data on a mixture of WLM (all the old) and eM (all the old and a lot of new), so it means much messing about to get the old and new merged on eM. I expect I shall have to export from eM’s IMAP ‘version’ and import to its POP3 ‘version.’ Or go through and find all the new on it and export it, then the old from WLM, and import both to eM. Messing about. Frankly, I have no wish to bother my neurons with it, but have to.
It would be nice if Automatic would tell us the effect of changing from POP3 to IMAP, which is what it will do if it detects that the ISP will accept both, even though our WLM was set up for POP3.
The point remains. I, like most people, have no wish to know complicated technicalities unless it is my job to. They should be invisible. When they were my job I made sure that no one had to know them to do what they wanted to do.
I still like eM’s user-interface. Just not the nasty surprise it delivers.
And to answer your question, no, it does not make sense, although I certainly understand that POP3 and IMAP are not the same. That is glaringly obvious, and it is also glaringly obvious that no one is interested enabling the obvious need. To most mortals downloading is downloading; it is copying data from a server down to a client, down to us; we do it all the time. Now it seems there is more than one flavour of it, one that is not copying it is only seeing as if through a camera, and when you download, even though you have a copy, you have not actually downloaded the copy you have on your disk, and where you ‘downloaded’ it from knows nothing about what you have done. As the old joke goes, ‘The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.’ Sigh…
Yes, standards change as technology changes. Now most people access the same email account on multiple devices, so IMAP or EWS are the only choices. It means that you can begin composing a message on your phone while commuting to the office, review it on your office computer during lunch, and finally finish it up and send it from your tablet while enjoying a fine summer evening in your garden at home.
This also means that because your data is stored on a server and not on your laptop, losing your laptop, or a hard disk failure, does not mean you lose your data. You just get another computer, or another device, and voilà, everything is there.
Everyone is not the same, and from the look of this it seems someone has worked out how to do the job:
https://www.limilabs.com/blog/delete-email-messages-with-imap