Email Setup on Storm - What's the best way?
 

I have a 9530 but this question applies equally to other phones.

I have a web domain and I pull my email from the mail server at that domain. I use MS Outlook on my PC. One of the setup options is to sync email with Outlook. But I don't always have my PC turned on, so it seems like a better idea to pull directly from the POP3. That way I will still be able to get my email on my phone when my PC is turned off.

I could set up an email forwarder to a different web address on my domain and pull the email from that account. But I've found that gmail does a better job at filtering spam mail, so I instead set up a forwarder to a gmail account, and I'm pulling messages to my Storm from the gmail. But I'm having 2 problems:
1) Any replies that I send from my Storm have the gmail email address as my "Reply to" address. I want people to reply to my standard website domain email address.
2) The IMAP sync doesn't remove messages from my Storm when I delete them from gmail. So I have to go through and delete the messages three times under my current setup... once from Outlook, once from my gmail account, and again on the Storm. I don't frequently do this, so the messages build up in all three places.
I'd like to be able to delete one time at one location and my PC and my phone synchronize to keep only the messages that I haven't deleted. The easiest place to delete messages is in Outlook... it takes a delete/confirm delete 2-step process to delete messages on the phone.
How do you have your email setup on your phone? Thanks in advance for your help.

Email doesn't sync unless you use BES, which I assume that you do not. Plus all BB email is "push", - pushed from RIM servers to the BB itself.

If you have a BIS account, then you set up email via the carrier's BIS site and mail is automatically pushed to the BB, no pull process for the BB.

Make sure that you have "leave Mail on Server" checked in the Outlook advanced setup tab, otherwise, once downloaded to Outlook, the mail is deleted from your server and cannot be sent to the BB.

Check out our FAQ section, Internet Email FAQs for more information, or consult your user guide.

I can't help with a three way sync in your setup (POP3 can't do it and I don't know if your current email host supports IMAP - many don't).

If you like gmail, you could ditch your current setup and change your domain's email over to a gmail business account. Your domain's email is attached to a gmail account transparently; your reply-to would be appropriate. And Google has a variety of mobile tools to help.

Not BES, but not too bad, either.

-jk

In my small business days, I would have told you BES all the way - and BES is still great! If you are looking to consolidate, GoogleApps will work fo ryou and I heard they have a BES connector now! Check that out!

Thanks for the advice. It's ironic that just yesterday when my wife went and bought a Blackberry Curve I discovered that I'd been paying $44.95/month for a data plan when Verizon has a $29.95/month data plan for Blackberry users. They said that since I'm using POP3 I don't need the more expensive data account... as long as I'm not using an enterprise server for my email. So I switched. Now it sounds like BES might require the more expensive plan after all! Would I be correct about that?
Google apps messaging with BES: See
Google Apps for business
Sorry... this is just 1/2 step above my head.

BES requires the 44.95 version.. 29.95 is for personal (BIS) users.