Outlook 2010 Deleting Messages when they are Deleted from the Server

I have outlook 2010 and it was set up automatically via IMAP to two separate register.com accounts. These accounts also are set up to download to my iPad and iPhone. All of a sudden whenever I delete a message on the server it is deleted from outlook as well. (This include messages manually deleted from the server and automatically deleted from Trash folder on the server).

I have lost a ton of important emails....any ideas what I can do to fix this?

Thanks in advance.

Does anyone know the answer to this question. I have the same problem and can't figure it out. Causing me to lose lots of emails.

this is so stupid I just recalled deleting messages from my hotmail account and outlook. and later when i went to check it directly in hotmail it was missing

richnrockville is correct - IMAP and POP are exact opposites of each other. What POP does is physically download/move your email messages to the device you are using. Unless you specifically tell it to "Leave messages on the server" your email client will delete the emails you read from the server when it downloads them to your device. That means that once you read a message on one device it is no longer available on your email server to be read by any other device.

IMAP is just the opposite: by default it does not delete messages at all. What an IMAP server does is create a set of directories on the server to hold your incoming, saved, sent, junk, etc. emails. Your email client makes it look like those folders are on your local device, but they are actually on the email server.

The benefit of IMAP is that is you have several different devices for reading email you can switch among them and everything stays the same for all of them. For instance, if you get your email on one device and delete some messages, they get put into the Deleted folder on the server. You can then go back, from a different device, and still see this deleted email by looking in the server's Deleted folder. The messages you did not delete will still appear in your Inbox no matter what device you use to access your email; the reason is that the emails were not downloaded/moved to the device you first used to read email.

Which method to use depends on how you use email. If you only use one device for email then POP is likely better because it lets your single device have complete control over what email is where. However, these days many people use multiple devices for doing email and in that case it is usually better to do IMAP because it centralizes control and essentially keeps everything in one place, thus giving you a consistent view of your email from whatever device you are using.

bbinnard, good post.
I am having a nightmare setting up my email. Originally i thought it was an issue with my service provider Virgin, but now I've managed to get it working in that I can send and recveive emails on my outlook 2010, AND iphone. Both are imap accounts.

However, the emails are deleting themselves automatically, and i also get an error message saying "unable to access email account, check username or password"... To see if it's my iphone that is deleting the emails I have disabled my iphone account as of today.. But i could find a setting that instruct it to delete emails when they are downloaded..

If anyone can help, i will be very grateful!

I've just deleted the Imap, and setup a pop3 instead, and still have the same username/password error... Don't know what else to try!! Any ideas?