Hi Charles! Well, the answer to that question depends on the type of email account you’re using—and yes, things may get a bit technical here, so bear with me.

While email services like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook have their own features, user interfaces, and other bells and whistles, they all use (for the most part) the same types of email “protocols” when it comes to delivering messages to external mail clients—you know, like the Mail program on your Mac, or your iPad’s Mail app.

Two of the most common protocols are POP (short for “Post Office Protocol”) and IMAP (“Internet Message Access Protocol”), and there’s an important difference between the two.

IMAP lets you sync messages and mail folders between your email provider and your desktop and mobile clients, while POP merely lets your email client “fetch” new messages from a mail server—no syncing allowed.

For example: with an IMAP email provider, if you read a message on your Mac and then move it into your “archive” folder, the message will also be neatly filed away on your iPad. With a POP provider, though, the messages you read and archive on your Mac will still show up as “new” messages in your iPad’s email inbox.

Now, as long as your email provider supports IMAP—and most big email services do, including Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook—the messages in your desktop client should sync up with your iPad.

As long as your email provider supports IMAP, you should be able to sync your email between multiple devices.

All you have to do is look up the right IMAP settings for your mobile and/or desktop email client. Just search your provider’s “help” pages, or go here for Gmail, here for Outlook.com, or here for Yahoo Mail.

OK, but what if your email service only supports POP email? (And yes, that’s still the case for some providers, particularly the smaller ones.)

If so, bad news: you won’t be able to sync email between your Mac and iPad (or between, say, your PC and an Android phone).

So if email syncing is important to you (and it sounds like it is), it might be time to consider jumping ship for a new email service.

Hope that helps, Charles. Still have questions? Let me know!

Bonus tip

Most modern email clients should configure your mail accounts automatically, no advanced settings required.

For example, both the Mac Mail client and your iPhone or iPad should be able to connect to a Gmail account—IMAP settings and all—once you enter your Google username and password.

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1. Try loading another site
One quick way to find out whether you’re the one with an Internet problem is to try visiting another web site. If Facebook isn’t loading, try Google, Yahoo, or any other site you can think of—and if it works, at least you know your Internet connection is still up.

2. Check a third-party monitoring site
There are dozens of sites on the web that promise to tell you whether a given site is actually down, or it’s just you—and indeed, the most popular of them all is called downforeveryoneorjustme.com. Just plug in the URL for the site you want to check, press “Enter,” and you’ll get a simple, instant answer. Downforeveryoneorjustme.com and its many clones will check any site on the web, but don’t expect much in the way of details.

A rash of complaints on Twitter is a sure sign that you're not the only one who can't access, say, Yahoo Mail.

A far more comprehensive site is Downrightnow.com, which tracks the status of more than a dozen major services including Facebook, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Netflix, and Twitter. Downrightnow boasts a dashboard that summarizes the status of all the sites it checks, or you can click an individual site for a 24-hour status history.

3. Subscribe to an official status feed
Several of the biggest web sites manage blogs and/or twitter feeds dedicated to detailing any status disruptions.

Both Twitter and Skype have their own status blogs, for example, while Netflix and Yahoo have official status feeds on Twitter. Instead of a blog, Google has a dashboard that reports on the status of its various apps, from Gmail to Google Documents. Facebook, meanwhile, has an official “Known Issues on Facebook” page, although it won’t do you much good if Facebook itself goes down.

4. See what people are saying on Twitter
Last but not least, you can always do your own Twitter search to see if others are tweeting about a downed site—well, as long as the site that’s down isn’t Twitter, of course. (You don’t need a Twitter account to search Twitter, by the way.)

Keep in mind that you’ll almost always find someone on Twitter complaining about a given site being down, especially if that site happens to be Facebook. The key, though, is frequency; if you search Twitter for “is facebook down” and get dozens of tweeted results from the past few minutes, chances are that something’s on the fritz.

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