Hi,
I know how to do this with a pop account but does anyone know how to do this with an exchange account?
With traditional POP3, each client you check your mail from downloads the messages from the server to your client. This is why you need specify actions on the server when mail is downloaded or deleted from the client (because technically, all you're really doing is modifying an offline
copy of your message, and thus those modifications don't sync across to the server or other devices).
For the most part, POP is a ONE-WAY transmission -- your client (whether it be Outlook on your computer or the mail app on your phone) only pulls information FROM the server -- all it really does is check the server at regular intervals for new messages, and if any are present, it downloads them. Once that happens, you are merely working with a local copy. On the server, you can set messages to be deleted either after downloading (which isn't good if you check your mail from more than 1 device), or some clients also support the option to tell the server to delete a message once you delete from your client, which will prevent any other mail clients from downloading the message.
POP3 is pretty basic, and in today's age of multiple devices and much more robust email account types, it really lacks the features to keep up with many people's setups...but it does get the job done if that's all that's available to you.
With most other newer protocols (IMAP, Exchange ActiveSync, etc), the client regularly syncs with the server. You are not in this case working with an offline copy, but rather seeing a real-time view of your mailbox on the server. These modern protocols support a full sync of not just your inbox, but also other folders as well, including sent items and any custom organizational folders you may have created. It doesn't matter if you're checking your mail using Outlook on your laptop, or using the mail client on your phone or tablet or even viewing webmail from a hotel kiosk...you're going to see the exact same content regardless of which device you use. For the most part, this is advantageous to the old POP3 method of simply grabbing copies of messages from a server...
but it also means that there really is no way to do what you're asking if you're using Exchange protocols to access your mail. When synced, you can't delete a message from your phone and still have it on your desktop. Of course, there really shouldn't be a reason to anyway, because you're usually not downloading the full message anyway (generally just the header info), so it's not as if it's consuming a ton of space on your device, assuming it's working as intended.
In some cases, if you REALLY want to be able to do this, Exchange does still support using POP, but your Exchange admins would have to have the feature enabled on the server and/or your account, and you'd have to use a manual setup for your mail client.