Sorry if this is not the right place for this question so please redirect me if necessary.

I am trying to understand how people who have both a laptop and smartphone handle emails i.e. to avoid having them mixed up between the 2 devices. What is the typical best practice?.

Any help/input appreciated.

The ideal best practice is to have an email account that supports IMAP (instead of POP). This will ensure that all devices and computers you have synchronise the same mail folders on on the server, including sent ones - and all devices/computers also know which emails have been opened.

Typically, when you open an email on either device it will be marked as read when you open your email account on the other device, no problem having access to your email accounts on multiple devices as the mail is stored on the mail server, not the device, you are essentially accessing your mail server remotely from your phone or computer!

Is everyone starting to use IMAP for both then and no longer downloading emails (pop3)?.
I was thinking perhaps people were using pop3 on the laptop and imap on the smartphone.This solves the inbox issue i.e. there always going to be in one place (laptop) but not the sent items folder. You will always have to have seperate sent items folder i assume?

I use outlook 2007 on my laptop pop3.

I tested accessing my mail server using imap from a ipad works fine. The problem i am seeing is i am going to end up with multiple sent items folders on different devices. Also i noticed when i delete an email via imap it goes to a trash folder on the server ie its not actually deleted. I came across this folder by accident when i logged into my control panel. Having always used smtp/pop3 i didnt realize this folder existed.

Personally I use IMAP on everything. You can usually configure your email client and determine where you want to save Sent and Trash etc (ie on the server and/or locally). I keep everything on the server and let my PC periodically empty the trash. In the past when I was using POP if I sent an email from my smartphone my computer had no record of it unless I copied it to myself. It's very messy doing it this way.

It hadn't occured to me that people were now keep all their emails (in and out) on the ISP's mail server, thank you, I will look into this.
I guess backup is something i need to look into then. If the ISP ever lost all our emails it would be a problem. Does anyone here do imap backups?. At the moment I back up my outlook pst file. I am wondering how you go about backing up the ISP's imap folder and if youre able to restore this to another provider should you move hosting companies

Use Googlemail myself

I leave everything on there in folders as if it was Outlook.

When on Laptop i just use the Web interface, when on phone i have Android so it seamlessly links to gmail.

On my phone I use EAS (Exchange ActiveSync - slightly more advanced than IMAP). On my laptop I continue to use POP to keep a local, offline copy of all emails. Downtime with GMail has shown that no email service is infallible and so I wouldn't want to rely on the cloud the way one would be with POP.

On my iPhone I use google mobile sync (Exchange). On computers I use the gmail web interface

What I do is drag the email messages from the server folders and drop them onto categorised (by client/task) local folders using my email client (Apple Mail) every now and again. Then it gets backed up with the rest of my computer.

have never seen any downtime on gmail

There was an incident in February this year I think. Some users lost all their emails and took a week to get most of them back - Google had to restore from tape. That was a major issue.

Other than that there have been a few outages over the years.

I use POP on my computer via outlook and just have my email on my iPhone as IMAP, delete the crap, or anything I no longer need if it comes in on my phone and then store the rest on the PC, it means then there's not huge amounts of data on the server

I cant decide whether to go IMAP for both or use your method. The disadvantge to your method is you end up with more than 1 sent items folder. The issue of moving email hosts, if i wanted to, is a concern when using IMAP i think ie your host has all your emails.