Need some help with HTC Touch Pro 2 and web based mail

[Howie411]

I use a web based mail called Netaddress. They support Pop3 and IMAP. I've had them for almost 10 years now and keep a lot of my emails I'd say most are in the main inbox but a few I actually moved around to sub folders. Originally I set up my phone as IMAP but I didn't realize deleting a message on my phone deleted it from the web based mail too, so I switched to Pop3.

Now I'm having a few issues, last week it was taking 5-10 minutes to search for new email and occasionally it would just hang, it would sit at Looking for changes or Disconnecting forever. I wasn't even able to remove the Email account until I reset the phone. Today I re-added it hoping that it was just a fluke, I hit send/receive and it told me it was checking 5600 headers (I'm guessing all t he emails I have saved) the funny thing is it was randomly d/ling some emails to the phone some as old as 2003. It got to about 3000/5000 (15 minutes) and then said sync failed and all the ones it had d/led disappeared.

Am I doing something wrong? I basically want this to work like my older dumb phones, where I can sync for emails whenever I want, it should only d/l new emails, maybe keeping a max of the last 15-20 on the phone and each time I get new mail the old ones are deleted and the new ones are added.

Thanks in advance.