Right now I'm looking at more than 10,000 messages on my Mac desktop in Mail - most of them read (I'll get to the rest tomorrow.) Looking at my iPhone it appears I have 9,322 messages that are unread. My iPad has a similar huge number of unread messages. Surely there is some way to be able to read a message on one of these devices, and have it automatically show as "read" on the others? Likewise, can't I just delete a message on one without having to delete it on all devices? I've gotten used to the idea that I'll always have a red dot on Mail on the iPad and iPhone, try as I might to keep up with them on the desktop - but oh, wouldn't it be nice!

Any ideas?
: ) Marti

Syncing between multiple devices with the same email accounts should occur if the email account is setup as an IMAP account on all devices. Deletion or read status should be reflected on your iPad or iPhone if read on the desktop and vice versa. Messages read on the desktop will not be visible in the inbox on the iPad or iPhone.

If the account is the older POP3 type, syncing will not occur and you wind up seeing double and a mess can ensue. Comcast only supports POP3, so a problem.

Gmail is a not well behaved IMAP account which Mavericks Apple Mail has been fighting for some time. If you have Gmail you should see a separate folder on Apple Mail (desktop) called All Mail (Gmail) which includes deleted and spam email as well as your wanted and read mail. Somewhat annoying since it periodically tries to resync with Gmail servers and can take better part of a day. Creating filters in Gmail through a browser interface has caused problems for some users in the recent past, but for me they map to folders on my Apple Mail desktop without a problem.

Using desktop Apple Mail you can set up a temporary smart folder to select those emails that are read (or unread or meet some more specific criteria) and send them to the trash or whatever. You can also use rules to put them in separate folders to reduce the size of your inbox. You can also select a number of messages and change their status to read or unread by hitting ⇧⌘ U.

Hope that helps, but may need more specific circumstances to answer your question better.

Thanks - since I have comcast, I guess I'm stuck. Bummer!

Aha! Got it to work! Turns out Comcast has an imap version in Beta form that even their reps don't know about...:

http://forums.comcast.com/t5/Macintosh/ ... 677#M11816

I was vaguely aware of that. This is a beta program, but they're a bit like Google in that things are in beta for a very long time.

Anyway, I tried it this afternoon, and it works as advertised. I applied (all of a 3 line application) and hit next. It instantly said my account was migrated, so went to set it up in Apple Mail. As noted in the Comcast forums, you have to trick Apple Mail by giving it a bogus provider name. If you give it Comcast, it will default to a POP account, knowing this is what Comcast normally provides. Revise the account information manually by entering in imap.comcast.net and port 993 for incoming and smtp.comcast.net and port 465 for outgoing. Fill in the Description and correct the email address in the first screen when looking at the account makes it work. Test to be sure before moving to other tasks. You may also want to modify the mailbox behaviors and where set mail is kept and for how long. The default is that new mailboxes are created on your Mac which reflect those on their server.

Thanks Marti for following up on this. Hope it solved your problem of duplicate emails.