User blog comment:CrazyAwesomeGamerGirl/Question about Email/@comment-24886041-20150214210813

You'll need to provide more context.

Which platform?

Which email app?

Are you using IMAP or POP3 access to your email account?

Generally, if you are accessing your email account via IMAP, changes you make in your mail client will directly affect the mail on the server. If you're using POP3, you have a choice to download a copy or download and remove from the server. If you do the first, your local copy will be entirely independent. If you do the second, you'll have the only copy.

Back before IMAP became popular (storing your emails on the server instead of locally), there was also another option, where the message would be kept on the server and a local copy would be downloaded -- and then if you delete the local copy, the next time you connect to the server it would delete it there too. While a bit complex, this meant that you could have one email client download all messages but not delete, and a second could come along and download AND delete, meaning email went to all devices, but none was left on the server. In practise, this sometimes resulted in emails vanishing or not going to the correct device.

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